Scaling Websites for Millions of Users

The diagram below illustrates the evolution of a simplified eCommerce website. It goes from a monolithic design on one single server, to a service-oriented/microservice architecture.

Suppose we have two services: inventory service (handles product descriptions and inventory management) and user service (handles user information, registration, login, etc.).

Step 1

With the growth of the user base, one single application server cannot handle the traffic anymore. We put the application server and the database server into two separate servers.

Step 2

The business continues to grow, and a single application server is no longer enough. So we deploy a cluster of application servers.

Step 3

Now the incoming requests have to be routed to multiple application servers, how can we ensure each application server gets an even load? The load balancer handles this nicely.

Step 4

With the business continuing to grow, the database might become the bottleneck. To mitigate this, we separate reads and writes in a way that frequent read queries go to read replicas. With this setup, the throughput for the database writes can be greatly increased.

Step 5

Suppose the business continues to grow. One single database cannot handle the load on both the inventory table and user table. We have a few options:

• Vertical partition. Adding more power (CPU, RAM, etc.) to the database server. It has a hard limit.
• Horizontal partition by adding more database servers.
• Adding a caching layer to offload read requests.

Step 6

Now we can modularize the functions into different services. The architecture becomes service-oriented / microservice.