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As software engineers, it's probably common nature to want our web applications used by thousands of users. That is, until they start failing on account of the very number of users they support.
When I faced one of my first performance and scalability issues with web applications -- circa 1999 -- expanding capacity was a painful ordeal. It required everything from on-site visits to a client's data center, ordering new hardware -- often times specialized hardware such as load-balancers -- to re-writing part of an application's business logic, all to accommodate increased user demand.
Times have changed for the better. Even though the previous techniques are still in use today to tackle a web application's performance and scalability issues, a series of technologies have emerged that make addressing these same concerns easier.
Now a days, a few simple clicks is all that can be required to transition a small-time web application into a large user base web application, without incurring in any performance or scalability hit. Hardware is practically available in an on-demand fashion, technologies for storing and accessing larger amounts of data have matured and both software & hardware in general have become more powerful.
The upcoming book explores general purpose web application performance and scalability techniques, with a strong emphasis on the use of cloud computing services, non-RDBMS data storage technologies and multi-core processors.
- Daniel Rubio
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