It is our pleasure to introduce Mr. Sumit Sanwal, a distinguished and seasoned specialist in the field of software application development. Widely recognized for his ability to craft applications characterized by superior scalability, performance, and high maintainability, Sumit has garnered acclaim for engineering solutions that seamlessly cater to extensive user bases. Navigating a seamless transition from India to the United States, he has contributed his skills to global industry leaders across multiple countries, firmly setting himself up in a prominent global niche.

Creating robust, resilient, and fault-tolerant systems is paramount to ensure the success of any software application. In this article, Mr. Sanwal emphasizes specific practices and strategies to develop robust and performant software applications. Mr. Sanwal recommends the resiliency strategies that contribute to the development of such applications:

Security Best Practices

Perform risk assessment of the prospective application. Based on the identified vulnerabilities and threats, technologists need to devise a threat modeling strategy to mitigate the threats and vulnerabilities. Also, use strategies like secure coding techniques, defense-in-depth, and security by design.

Self-healing capabilities in the application using design for failure. One example is to automatically restart a process when it fails. Also, use design patterns like circuit breakers to enhance availability and reliability and reduce dormancy in distributed systems. 

Have a robust disaster recovery and backup plan in place to switch to a disaster recovery site in case of main site failure and use backup for any failure. Also, this should be assessed occasionally to ensure the disaster recovery is in place and running to ensure failover and high availability.

Redundancy

Always have multiple instances of software and backend systems. Also, multiple hardware systems for backend processing servers like database servers or streaming servers. If any components fail, redundancy will ensure failover mechanisms and a graceful transition to backups or alternate resources.

Modular Design

Design the application with loosely coupled architecture to ensure all the application modules are self-contained and any issue or error in one part is confined to that part only and not affecting other components.

Automated testing

Have automated testing of all application functionality for any change in the application with automated test data generation and test case upgradation. This will ensure any new change is automatically evaluated and does not break the application.

Automated monitoring

Have robust monitoring, profiling, and notification mechanisms in place to perform automated troubleshooting for any issue encountered, as well as to proactively detect any performance bottlenecks. Leverage AI and ML models and algorithms for automated application tracking & monitoring, issue identification, root cause analysis and application restart capabilities.

Distributed processing and Scalability

Design the application to support distributed processing and with the right scaling capabilities to ensure the application can support processing varying loads and self-adapt the processing using scalability and distributed processing with the best performance.

Use appropriate load balancing

Architecture should have a uniform distribution of incoming traffic across multiple servers using load balancing. This helps leverage the capacity of all the servers and nodes optimally and efficiently and ensures any node is not overloaded. 

Scalable Application

Harness the advanced capabilities of contemporary cloud computing to cultivate scalable applications to accommodate varying workloads. Employ horizontal scaling of applications to seamlessly adjust the processing infrastructure on a demand basis. This strategic approach eases the calibration of processing infrastructure according to the dynamic requirements, allowing for swift scaling up and down based on processing needs. 

Develop the application with the right design and architecture: Choosing a suitable architecture hinges on meticulous consideration of processing requirements. In instances requiring substantial data processing, innovative distributed processing software becomes pivotal, offering scalability in the processing realm. Throughout the design and development phases, paramount attention should be directed toward conceiving and implementing code of utmost performance, employing the best algorithms, and judiciously choosing data structures for the processing logic. 

Additional performance optimization considerations

For frequently accessed data, it is imperative to employ a suitable caching strategy. This involves computing the data once and storing it in the cache, making it readily available for subsequent usage. 

During the performance testing phase following the development of the new application, it is imperative to subject the application to rigorous stress tests across various performance parameters. This approach aims to pinpoint any weaknesses or anomalies in the processing and fine-tuning of the application’s performance.

Upon the completion of the application’s implementation, continual and vigilant monitoring and tracking of its performance appear as indispensable measures for promptly finding and addressing any potential issues. The significance of the application’s criticality becomes a determining factor in selecting the best implementation strategies. Among these strategies, using a blue-green deployment involving two identical environments to minimize downtime and mitigate risks associated with deploying new versions or updates stands out. Alternatively, a canary deployment approach can be embraced, gradually introducing an updated version to a subset of end users before a broader rollout. Deployment teams are encouraged to meticulously assess various deployment strategies to discern the best approach tailored to the unique characteristics of the application in question.

Mr. Sanwal trusts that the outlined points above will serve as valuable insights for enhancing the design of applications. These considerations stem from his accumulated experience spanning two decades. As technology continues to evolve with groundbreaking advancements, we, as technologists, must remain abreast of the latest developments. This knowledge equips us to judiciously use innovative technologies, ensuring the adept construction of the best solutions that align with the unique needs of our organizations. The commitment to staying informed and embracing innovation underscores our dedication to delivering solutions at the forefront of innovation.

You can get in touch with Sumit Sanwal via sumitsanwal@gmail.com and connect with him on LinkedIn using the following link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumit-sanwal-7781207/

Published by: Aly Cinco