How to Build Scalability in DevOps from Day One

How to Build Scalability in DevOps from Day One

Updated: August 24, 2021

You know what sucks? Building an awesome app that could change the lives of thousands of people, only to see it die because you didn’t think of scalability from day one. There comes a day in the life of every startup when they need to ask for funding. After all, you can’t bootstrap forever.

Before you know it, you’re trying & praying for that first round of investment. What usually follows is a technical audit that is meant to determine the current status of your startup infrastructure, if it can be easily scaled and whether it can withstand accelerated growth.

Here’s the harsh reality: if the results of this audit are not in your favor, you could lose your chance to get funded. Ouch! That’s really not something you’d want, right?

Not every startup thinks about scalability from the start - be different!

When you get that awesome idea, you start coding right away. After all, you want to go to market as fast as possible. Otherwise, someone else could build your app and take over the market before you. But in doing so, you could sentence your startup to failure. Why? Because you’re not ready for success.

When investors look for startups to invest in, they want to be able to make a profit without too much hassle. This means your app’s architecture needs to be easily scalable to accommodate double, triple, or even ten times more users than it has now.
So if you don’t start your startup journey with scalability in mind, by the time you want to attract the funding, you might need to build a completely different architecture.

No one has time for that. Definitely not investors.

What Is Scalable Architecture, Really?

Ok, so now you might be wondering how you should make sure you’re going in the right direction from the start. Here’s how a scalable architecture for your startup should look like:

1. No crashes

  • No one wants to use an app that constantly crashes.
  • If you have lots of users, or if you have a spike in traffic and you don’t get your architecture ready for that in advance, crashes will happen. And they will happen frequently.
  • The solution for this is having servers on stand-by that can automatically take over if any issues arise.

2. No downtime

If there’s one thing even more annoying than an app that crashes, it’s probably an app that’s almost always down. Downtime can occur due to various reasons, but most frequently happens due to spikes in traffic.

Again, scalable infrastructures should easily take care of such issues, so downtime doesn’t occur.

3. Faster loading speed

Your app’s not down and it doesn’t crash, but it takes forever to load. Bonkers. Lag definitely won’t make users (or investors!) appreciate your app.

Building your app on top of high-performance servers with the right configurations should ensure your app runs within optimal parameters.

4. Better Security

This isn’t something your users can see, but it’s definitely important. How you handle your users’ data and how you protect it from breaches and attacks matters.

Sometimes, complex security solutions can slow down your app or cause crashes. You already know how important it is that these situations don’t occur.

Well, all this sounds nice, but infrastructures like these take lots of time and knowledge to build. And you might not have any of those.

And even if you do, your time is better spent elsewhere, like actually building your app and designing new features that will blow people’s minds. You shouldn’t waste too much time troubleshooting problems with your infrastructure.

The immediate answer would be to hire a DevOps team. But DevOps are rare and expensive, and your startup might not have the budget for it.

So what should you do? Compromise your infrastructure?

Of course not! You can just use Bunnyshell.

How Bunnyshell can help you

Bunnyshell is the best solution to reap the benefits of scalable infrastructure, but without the headache of actually building it. This way, you have more time to focus on building your app.

How do we do it? Let’s start with our motto, “Deploy and forget”.

What this means is that we lower the complexity of deploying applications to the cloud. With Bunnyshell, you can deploy your app with just one click. Pretty cool, huh?

But deploying is not done every day, so it doesn’t take too much of your time. It’s actually maintenance and monitoring that are the most time-consuming tasks.

Thankfully, this is something that can be easily automated. So you can just set it once and then forget about it.

Let’s see what the process looks like using Bunnyshell.

Step 1: Create your environment

First, from your dashboard, you choose your preferred IaaS provider and server location. You can choose from more than 70 global data-centers from Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Azure, or Cloudflare.

Then, with just one click, you can create your environment and scale depending on your needs.

All your certificates, keys, and other resources will be stored in one place, and you’ll be able to access them anytime you need from your dashboard.

Step 2: Provision your servers

The next step is provisioning. This is where things usually get tricky. Provisioning your servers is a job for DevOps or sysadmins. And wrong configurations can take you days or even weeks to fix. Not to mention the impact this will have on your app.

Of course, you could always learn how to do it, but why would you want to waste your time with that?

No need to, Bunnyshell solves that for you as well. With just one click, you can install the most common packages and apply production-ready configurations. This will decrease the allocated time from days to just a few minutes.

Step 3: Deploying your application

Deploying your application is just as easy. And because your infrastructure is kept in the cloud, you can expect zero downtime.

That’s right! Your app will never be down again.

Step 4: Optimize and fine-tune

Now that you’re up and running, all you need to do is monitor your performance using the visual dashboards.

The best thing about the Bunnyshell dashboard is that you can see how your app is performing in real-time. In case any issues appear, you can quickly and easily isolate and solve them. You are always in control.

Got any spikes in traffic? Instantly create new servers with the exact same configurations as production with just one click. Or let the Bunnyshell automatic scaling feature do it FOR you.

Does this all sound too good to be true? It’s not. That’s just how cloud management should work.

Bunnyshell is the solution to all of your problems, not only today but in the future as well, no matter how much (or fast!) you’re growing.