Rem wrote
Can you give us some more specific information regarding your situation?
Like number of users right now, what kind of system our are building (public self-register, inhouse company ...) and how many users you are expecting and how fast they have to be onboarded? More companies or more clients in the same company etc.
Also, how about upgrades to the system, how often do you plan to push upgrades.
We have similar questions, but right now we are developing and are HOPING the our application will take of (so we will not have the "problem" otherwise)
I can share some information but is a complex scenario so just sharing some overarching details.
Background:
The application is for the tourism sector and has a public facing part that in theory can explode with users and/but only during peak times here and there and primarily during the summer season so the main problem I need to plan for is peaks in users and how scale up/down the infrastructure. I have run a successful pilot project with the product on a small scale and now "taking it to market" or whatever you want to call it and as part of that we are currently in negotiations with 4 municipalities where the app can be rolled out as part of a "kickstart tourism" campaign (after Corona) and depending on how big they want to make it, it can become gigantic with many thousands of users (peaks). We have not closed the deal yet and as it is a municipality/state affair, they have a lot of hops we have to jump through, estimate costs and contingencies etc. etc. and that is basically what we are trying to do now and to do that, we need to plan/estimate a infrastructure and scaling plan and Aware is the core component in that planning.
Infrastructure:
The infrastructure we need to set up is basically a base infrastructure which consists of 1) Aware application server, 2) database server and 3) IIS static content server. This is the base infrastructure (1 per city so can be many different base infrastructures) and then the base infrastructure needs to be able to scale up adding more Aware and IIS servers and scale down by removing Aware and IIS servers. The scaling up/down is based on demand of course and the main problem again is peaks in users. I only have experience working with dedicated servers and slowly growing the app in size etc. and/but for a situation like this, we need to use a cloud hosting platform where we can add servers automatically or in a simple way to cover peaks and then of course after the peak, we need to scale down again so we don´t pay for the entire infrastructure during the entire month or year.
Problems:
One of the main problems is uncertainty, we have no clue how many users we might get during peaks and all depends on scope e.g how many cities in the municipalities are part of solution? all municipalities? distribution/marketing, how will this be distributed etc. etc.?. Another uncertain element is, how many concurrent users can a single Aware app handle? We also need to have a plan for the scaling of Aware (license problems etc.), scaling IIS is easy. Part of this is also of course setting up the entire infrastructure (s) with a cloud hosting platform and all it entails (load balancing, which cloud platform is best etc. etc. etc.).
I am in dialogue with Vlad about the entire situation so feel at easy knowing he is in my ringside but still, it´s a lot of moving parts needing to be thought through and planned/estimated and then we´ll see where it leads. If we don´t close, we are still taking the product to market but then we won´t have problems like this to think about, at least not initially.
Any input, tips etc. are appreciated.
PS: Rune, I would also be interested to hear more about your app and situation?
