Bring #web scale to backend business systems via adapters, replication, sharding, queuing & caching of #data to support a growing #mobile workforce.
Many of the backend systems running global business over the last several decades have something in common besides not being able to communicate with mobile devices. They’re not designed to support the scale needed to empower today’s mobile workforces. Actually, most of these packages and associated databases were designed for departmental or workgroup use in a world where everyone had a single PC on their desk. The IT infrastructures of most companies are wholly unprepared to support mobility.
Whether you’re wrapping your systems in REST APIs or using a mobile middleware package, you have the ability to boost the scale of those old systems using several clever techniques. For starters, the servers used to create a new mobile API tier should be designed to cache frequently-used data so repeated calls to the backend servers won’t be needed. This could range from a simple file cache, to using staging tables in a database. To scale-out this mobile API tier, data could be replicated across multiple nodes resulting in a sharding architecture that further spreads the load generated by mobile devices making requests. To further de-couple the system, data uploads from mobile apps could be dropped in queues and processed by background processes. All these things will have the effect of boosting both the performance and scalability of your existing backend systems.
Improve User Productivity and reduce expenses by increasing the number of employees and customers served by existing line of business systems. What is your organization doing to beef up its systems to serve more users and devices?
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