What’s the right app infrastructure?

When you’re in the app development stage, it’s important to consider how your users will be interacting with our app. The content or service you’re providing will determine how and when your users will use your app. You’ll need to understand the timing of traffic in order to build the right app infrastructure.

What to take into considerations for your app infrastructure…

Our Managing Director Paul Jarrett explains how this may vary. For instance if you’re producing a gambling app, you’ll receive a high volume of traffic on a weekend, or just before a sports match, meaning your infrastructure needs to cope with significant peaks and troughs of usage. On the other hand, if you’re developing a news forum, users will access it throughout the week, maybe every morning and evening. Alternatively, if you’re developing an enterprise app, the infrastructure will be set my your company guidelines, and therefore you might not have much flexibility, however it’s still important to understand how your app will be affected.

Watch the video above to hear the clip in full.

Want to know more?

For more tips and advice, you can view the rest of our videos on the Sonin YouTube page. If you have a specific question about your app infrastructure, get in touch via the LiveChat app at the bottom of your screen or send us an email to info@sonin.agency.

Read the full transcript for ‘What’s the right app infrastructure for the backend of my app’ here…

So choosing the right infrastructure for the back end of your app will depend a lot on what your doing. What type of users you have, and when they’re going to be accessing the service.
So for instance, if you’re building an enterprise app, then you’ll probably find a lot of the infrastructure will be set by your corporate IT team. If you’re building something on the consumer side, or maybe outside of your corporate environment, you’ll have a lot more freedom.

And in those instances, the type of things that we tend to look at is the real-time performance. I.e. whether you need the data to be instant and immediate or whether its a kind of polling service.
And then the peaks and troughs you’ll have between when users are using the app.

For instance, we have some clients in the gambling market, and most of their users will come at the weekend. Maybe on a Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon as everyone flocks in to try and place their bets.

Whereas someone who’s producing a news app, will have a much more distributed usage throughout the week. So they’ll still have peaks and troughs, but they’ll typically be in the evenings or mornings. Rather than all in one peak in one day. So therefore the infrastructure they need is very different.

You need to have a lot more capacity on a Saturday afternoon if you’re in gambling. Whereas if you’re in a news feed, maybe you have a standard capacity throughout the week.
In those instances, a cloud provider that offers a kind of elastic service will allow you to have those peaks and troughs. Without having to have huge amounts of hardware there doing nothing for most of the time.

So that tends to be the route that most of our apps will go down. On the flip side if you’re doing something a little bit different. Maybe you’re looking at IoT for example, you may well use an intermediary through someone like your network provider.

But you may also look at something like the Microsoft Azure IoT hub for example. And they’ll handle a lot of the different protocols that you’ll need to take into account and make your life easier.