Scaling influencers

We don't scale our software systems just because we can. While it's common to tout scalability, these claims need to be put into practice. In order to do so, there has to be a reason for scalable software. If there's no need to scale, then it's much easier, not to mention cost-effective, to simply build a system that doesn't scale. Putting something that was built to handle a wide variety of scaling issues into a context where scale isn't warranted just feels clunky. Especially to the end user.

So we, as JavaScript developers and architects, need to acknowledge and understand the influences that necessitate scalability. While it's true that not all JavaScript applications need to scale, it may not always be the case. For example, it's difficult to say that we know this system isn't going to need to scale in any meaningful way, so let's not invest the time and effort to make it scalable. Unless we're developing a throw-away system, there's always going to be expectations of growth and success.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, JavaScript applications aren't born as mature scalable systems. They grow up, accumulating scalable properties along the way. Scaling influencers are an effective tool for those of us working on JavaScript projects. We don't want to over-engineer something straight from inception, and we don't want to build something that's tied-down by early decisions, limiting its ability to scale.

The need for scale

Scaling software is a reactive event. Thinking about scaling influencers helps us proactively prepare for these scaling events. In other systems, such as web application backends, these scaling events may be brief spikes, and are generally handled automatically. For example, there's an increased load due to more users issuing more requests. The load balancer kicks in and distributes the load evenly across backend servers. In the extreme case, the system may automatically provision new backend resources when needed, and destroy them when they're no longer of use.

Scaling events in the frontend aren't like that. Rather, the scaling events that take place generally happen over longer periods of time, and are more complex. The unique aspect of JavaScript applications is that the only hardware resources available to them are those available to the browser in which they run. They get their data from the backend, and this may scale up perfectly fine, but that's not what we're concerned with. As our software grows, a necessary side-effect of doing something successfully, is that we need to pay attention to the influencers of scale.

The preceding figure shows us a top-down flow chart of scaling influencers, starting with users, who require that our software implements features. Depending on various aspects of the features, such as their size and how they relate to other features, this influences the team of developers working on features. As we move down through the scaling influencers, this grows.

Growing user base

We're not building an application for just one user. If we were, there would be no need to scale our efforts. While what we build might be based on the requirements of one user representative, our software serves the needs of many users. We need to anticipate a growing user base as our application evolves. There's no exact target user count, although, depending on the nature of our application, we may set goals for the number of active users, possibly by benchmarking similar applications using a tool such as http://www.alexa.com/. For example, if our application is exposed on the public internet, we want lots of registered users. On the other hand, we might target private installations, and there, the number of users joining the system is a little slower. But even in the latter case, we still want the number of deployments to go up, increasing the total number of people using our software.

The number of users interacting with our frontend is the largest influencer of scale. With each user added, along with the various architectural perspectives, growth happens exponentially. If you look at it from a top-down point of view, users call the shots. At the end of the day, our application exists to serve them. The better we're able to scale our JavaScript code, the more users we'll please.

Building new features

Perhaps the most obvious side-effect of successful software with a strong user base is the features necessary to keep those users happy. The feature set grows along with the users of the system. This is often overlooked by projects, despite the obviousness of new features. We know they're coming, yet, little thought goes into how the endless stream of features going into our code impedes our ability to scale up our efforts.

This is especially tricky when the software is in its infancy. The organization developing the software will bend over backwards to reel in new users. And there's little consequence of doing so in the beginning because the side-effects are limited. There's not a lot of mature features, there's not a huge development team, and there's less chance of annoying existing users by breaking something that they've come to rely on. When these factors aren't there, it's easier for us to nimbly crank out the features and dazzle existing/prospective users. But how do we force ourselves to be mindful of these early design decisions? How do we make sure that we don't unnecessarily limit our ability to scale the software up, in terms of supporting more features?

As we'll see throughout this book, new feature development, as well as enhancing existing features, is an ongoing issue with scalable JavaScript architecture. It's not just the number of features listed in the marketing literature of our software that we need to be concerned about . There's also the complexity of a given feature, how common our features are with one another, and how many moving parts each of these features has. If the user is the first level when looking at JavaScript architecture from a top-down perspective, each feature is the next level, and from there, it expands out into enormous complexity.

It's not just the inpidual users who make a given feature complex. Instead, it's a group of users that all need the same feature in order to use our software effectively. And from there, we have to start thinking about personas, or roles, and which features are available for which roles. The need for this type of organizational structure isn't made apparent till much later on in the game; after we've made decisions that make it difficult to introduce role-based feature delivery. And depending on how our software is deployed, we may have to support a variety of unique use cases. For example, if we have several large organizations as our customers, each with their own deployments, they'll likely have their own unique constraints on how users are structured. This is challenging, and our architecture needs to support the disparate needs of many organizations, if we're going to scale.

Hiring more developers

Making these features a reality requires solid JavaScript developers who know what they're doing, and if we're lucky, we'll be able to hire a team of them. The team part doesn't happen automatically. There's a level of trust and respect that needs to be established before the team members begin to actively rely on one another to crank out some awesome code. Once that starts happening, we're in good shape. Turning once again to the top-down perspective of our scaling influencers, the features we deliver can directly impact the health of our team. There's a balance that's essentially impossible to maintain, but we can at least get close. Too many features and not enough developers lead to a sense of perpetual inadequacy among team members. When there's no chance of delivering what's expected, there's not much sense in trying. On the other hand, if you have too many developers, and there's too much communication overhead due to a limited number of features, it's tough to define responsibilities. When there's no shared understanding of responsibilities, things start to break down.

It's actually easier to deal with not enough developers for the features we're trying to develop, than having too many developers. When there's a large burden of feature development, it's a good opportunity to step back and think—"what would we do differently if we had more developers?" This question usually gets skipped. We go hire more developers, and when they arrive, it's to everyone's surprise that there's no immediate improvement in feature throughput. This is why it's best to have an open development culture where there are no stupid questions, and where responsibilities are defined.

There's no one correct team structure or development methodology. The development team needs to apply itself to the issues faced by the software we're trying to deliver. The biggest hurdle is for sure the number, size, and complexity of features. So that's something we need to consider when forming our team initially, as well as when growing the team. This latter point is especially true because the team structure we used way back when the software was new isn't going to fit what we face when the features scale up.