Software Architecture – Web Application Technical Terminologies for Technical Product Manager and Program Manager
1. Scalability
Scalability means the ability of the application to handle increased workload without sacrificing the latency.
For instance, if your application/website takes 5 seconds to respond to a user request. It should take the same 5 seconds to respond to each of the million concurrent user requests on your application/website.
Application’s backend infrastructure should not fail and crumble under a load of a million concurrent requests. Backend infrastructure should scale well when subjected to a heavy traffic load & should maintain the latency of the system.
2. Latency
Latency is the amount of time a system takes to respond to a user request. Assume a user sends a request to an application/website to view an image & application/website takes 5 seconds to respond to your request. The latency of the system is 5 seconds.
If the latency remains the same, then we say that the application/website scaled well for the increased load.
3. High Availability
High availability is the ability of the system to stay online despite having failures at the infrastructural level in real-time.
4. Redundancy – Active-Passive HA Mode
Redundancy is duplicating the components or instances & keeping them on standby to take over in case the active instances go down. It’s the fail-safe, backup mechanism.
5. Replication – Active-Active HA Mode
Replication means having a number of similar nodes running the workload together. There are no standby or passive instances. When a single or a few nodes go down, the remaining nodes bear the load of the service. Think of this as load balancing.