System Design Concepts: Architecture of Production Web Apps
Behind every flawless app you use, there’s a world of architecture, testing, monitoring, and security measures. Today, let’s have a look at the very high-level architecture of a production-ready app.
CI/CD Pipelines
Our first key area is Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment — the CI/CD Pipeline.
This ensures that our code goes from the repository, through a series of tests and pipeline checks, and onto the production server without any manual intervention.
It’s configured with platforms like Jenkins or GitHub Actions for automating our deployment processes.
Interacting with Servers:
Once our app is in production, it has to handle lots of user requests. This is managed by our Load Balancers and Reverse Proxies, like Nginx.
They ensure that the user requests are evenly distributed across multiple servers, maintaining a smooth user experience even during traffic spikes.
The Backbone: Data Storage & External APIs
Our server is also going to need to store data. For that, we also have an external storage server that is not running on the same production server. Instead, it’s connected over a network.
Our servers might also be communicating with other servers as well. And we can have many such services not just one.
Monitoring, Logs, & Alerts: The Silent Protectors
To ensure everything runs smoothly, we have logging and monitoring systems, keeping a keen eye on every micro-interaction, storing logs, and analyzing data.
It’s standard practice to store logs on external services, often outside our primary production server.
For the backend, tools like PM2 can be used for logging and monitoring. On the front end, platforms like Sentry can be used to capture and report errors in real time.
Alerting Service
And when things don’t go as planned, meaning our logging system detects failing requests or anomalies?
First, it informs our alerting service. After that, Push notifications are sent to keep users informed. From generic ‘Something went wrong’ to specific ‘Payment Failed’, effective communication ensures users aren’t left in the dark, fostering trust and reliability.
Modern practice is to integrate these alerts directly into platforms we commonly use, like Slack.
Imagine a dedicated Slack channel where alerts pop up the moment an issue arises. This allows developers to jump into action almost instantly, addressing the root cause before it escalates.
Debugging in Production:
After that developers have to debug the issue.
Log Diving: First and foremost, the issue needs to be identified. Those logs we spoke about earlier? They’re our first port of call. Developers sift through them, searching for patterns or anomalies that could point to the source of the problem.
Replicate in a Safe Environment: The golden rule is to — Never debug directly in the production environment. Instead, developers recreate the issue in a ‘staging’ or ‘test’ environment. This ensures users don’t get affected by the debugging process.
Developers use tools to peer into the running application and start debugging.
Hotfixes: Once the bug is fixed, a ‘hotfix’ is rolled out. This is a quick, temporary fix designed to get things running again. It’s like a patch before a more permanent solution can be implemented.
What’s Next
If you’re curious about how to scale these architectures to handle even larger user bases and even more complex systems, make sure to check out System Design Concepts and Scaling Mechanisms
.