Introduction

If you need to design web applications, mobile apps, and software products with future growth in mind, without sufficient room for handling the additional workload, the system may start lagging or even crash at times. Software scalability has become essential for the longevity of your business.

While designing software applications, a balance is required between project cost, scalability, security, and timelines. When you hire scalability developers experienced in making such tradeoffs, you not only meet but exceed client expectations.

What is Scalability?

Consider a system aptly handling a workload of 100,000 users a day (average 70 users/minute) with a peak load capacity of 200 users per minute. What would happen if the peak load increased many times over suddenly – to say 1,000 or 2,000 users per minute? Most likely, the system would crash as it could not handle a sudden surge in load.

Scalability is a system design feature that can help you with spikes in peak workload that come and go abruptly. A scalable system does not require redesign, reconfiguration, and restarting to maintain an adequate level of performance during a sudden and steep rise in workload.

The workload here could mean, as in the example above, the number of simultaneous user requests, storage, number of concurrent transactions, etc. A sudden and steep rise in the workload means any situation that puts stress on system resources – CPU, memory, storage, bandwidth, number of open files, open connections, ongoing transactions, etc. – beyond its initially intended capacity.

Software scalability is built as a design element in software tools to dynamically cater to the increased workload by increasing its capacity on-demand. Scalable software systems remain stable and do not abruptly crash due to sudden rise and fall in resource demand.

Who are Scalability Developers?

A Scalability developer for web applications, mobile apps, connected software, and enterprise solutions understands the constraints of the business and then finds ways to keep the system agile even when the demands on the system rise steeply.

They work on the following:

• Performance: Identify using stress testing system threshold and modern load balancing techniques to overcome lag in performance.
• Recoverability: Implement mechanisms to allow the system to diagnose and recover to its normal state after it experiences overburdening or failure.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Develop the mechanism to dynamically acquire additional resources only when needed, thereby saving on costs.
• Ease of Management: Make the system scalable without compromising its comfort of maintenance, system updates, and application upgrades.

Scalability developers can help resolve many issues that hamper performance, application maintenance, and growth. When you hire scalability developers with experience, you can tackle all these issues head-on and build a world-class application.

Development Technology and Tools for Scalability Developers

There are many tools and technologies available for scalability developers offering benefits in better design, optimized code, and enhanced scalability.

1. Load Balancing

These include OS, DBMS Servers, and Application Servers with load balancing capabilities. Load balancing becomes crucial when you opt for scaling out or horizontal scaling and add more resources at run-time to the distributed infrastructure.

2. Micro-services

Micro-services, also known as FaaS (Function-as-a-Service), allow lightweight remote procedure calls to develop a decentralized and modular system. It makes it possible to access these micro-services using APIs from any server, and maintenance of the system becomes much easier.

3. Resource Caching

Co-locating the heavily accessed resources near the client takes care of system load. This can be quickly done by placing personal data securely in the local cache on the client-end. Scalability developers also consider edge computing, where the data for local users is kept on nearer servers.

4. Cloud-based Deployment

Cloud-based deployment of application servers makes available storage, platform, and infrastructure all available on an on-demand basis to you. You can add as much secondary storage as you want, hire as many resources as you need, and get scalable infrastructure on-demand. For scalability developers, cloud computing and virtualization tools are a must.

5. Asynchronous Processing

A statement after a function call does not wait for it to return in asynchronous processing and instead continues to perform its work. It is possible to divide your work into discrete steps that do not depend on each other.

6. Scalable Database

When it comes to writing operations, SQL databases are a lot more difficult to scale, unlike NoSQL databases. Though, for reading operations, SQL database systems can also scale. It is because of the less stringent application of ACID principles by NoSQL databases.

7. Maintenance

Maintenance is essential to keep any system running – scalable or not. It includes simple things like clearing database cache, closing unused connections, reclaiming unreferenced buffers, timing out long-running sessions, etc. Again, maintenance must be built into your system design and must be automated for the most part.

Roles and Responsibility of Scalability Developers

A scalability developer works with every member of the system development team – analysts, developers, system, database & network admins, and testers. They must have experience developing web applications, mobile apps, web services, and distributed desktop applications for all industry verticals and domains.

Their primary responsibility is to identify bottlenecks that can hamper the application's performance when required and work towards removing them. It requires extensive knowledge in software engineering, cloud computing, system administration, network management, database administration, and front-end development.

Further, a scalability developer should be able to decipher the usage patterns of the application and should be able to take pre-emptive measures to handle sudden spikes based on such designs.

Required Expertise

Hard skills

The mandatory skills to become a professional Scalability Developer include:

• To estimate resource requirements from product specifications.
• To develop and deploy mechanisms to identify system-wide bottlenecks.
• To submit proposals for enhancing the scalability of the application.
• To identify and overcome limitations in hardware and OS configurations.
• To help in database design, query optimization, performance tuning, and efficient transaction processing.
• To tune network and bandwidth to help scale the performance.
• To ensure the use of microservices, APIs, asynchronous processing, and localized resource caching.
• To design a front-end that minimizes the load on the backend.
• To maintain the cloud or distributed computing infrastructure.
• To prepare and maintain technical and functional documentation.
  

Experience

A scalability developer is not a regular application or front-end developer as they have to dabble in many areas outside of conventional development. They have to be involved at every stage of application development – from conceptual design to deployment & maintenance – that they become virtually masters of all trades.

As they need to work with people in diverse fields and periodic meetings with the clients, they must have strong communication skills, excellent people skills, and practice good negotiation techniques, besides being conversant in technology.

The key areas of expertise for a Scalability Developer are many, such as:

• Highly experienced in IT and Networking skills.
• Highly experienced in virtualization and cloud-based technologies.
• Proficient in Database administration and performance tuning.
• Experienced in System administration and configuration.
• Keen observation skills with excellent analytical skills.
• Highly experienced in coding, code optimization, testing, and maintenance.
• Highly experienced in asynchronous processing and API-based microservices development.

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Salary Structure of Scalability Developers

The average annual salary of an experienced Scalability developer is in the range of USD 70,000 and USD 85,000 in the USA. The average yearly salary for a scalability developer is USD 50,000, while the highest annual salary goes up to USD 110,000.

The salary depends on the experience in attaining scalability for applications. It also depends on their location, years of experience, knowledge of technology, and professional certifications.

Certifications for Scalability Developers

Professional certifications in the fields of cloud computing & virtualization, network administration, database administration, system administration, and performance tuning can help a scalability developer gain deep insights. A certified developer with vital skills and a certain level of experience will command a better package against a developer without professional certifications.

Scalability Developers - Key Takeaways

• Scalability is a design choice and requires dedicated scalability developers withhold on all aspects of application design, development, deployment, and maintenance.
• A scalability developer manages the performance of the applications during the sudden surge in demand.
• A scalability developer needs to have proficiency and hands-on experience in many technologies and tools.
• They are responsible for the successful working of the application under severe stress on resources without affecting the user experience.
• Scalability developers need to collaborate with the entire team of the application development lifecycle till it is retired.
  

Industry Expertise

Skuad is a leading service provider with a team of experienced, certified, and highly skilled developers in diverse modern technologies. It offers world-class competency and exceptional client service, and timely results to all clients – small, medium, and large enterprises.

Whether you are looking to outsource your application development requirements or hire the best global talent, Skuad can deliver on both counts. Our highly customizable packages and solutions cater to the unique needs of each client individually.

We offer our services compliant with all the applicable rules, regulations, and laws in your jurisdiction and your clients' jurisdiction. Our managed services or recruitment services are available on a 24x7x365 basis to global clients from all business verticals.

Therefore, your search to hire scalability developers ends now as you entrust Skuad with your needs, and rest assured.

Talk to Skuad experts today!