Performance Efficiency - Design Principles and Tradeoffs

Question 1

Design Principles

Answer 1

• Go Global
• Think serverless
• Use new technologies
• Experiment often
• Use the right tool for the task

Question 2

Tradeoffs

Answer 2

• Always it depends
• Characteristics that affect each other: processing / maintenance / request time, cost, complexity, memory, and efficiency

Question 3

Implementing tradeoffs - SQS

Answer 3

• Tradeoff: requests processing time vs efficiency (resource utilization)
• Decouples different parts of the application
• Both sides can scale independently
• Determine the acceptable delay

Question 4

Implementing tradeoffs - Data partitioning

Answer 4

• Tradeoff: complexity and consistency vs processing / maintenance time
• In a RDBMS it’s usually not directly implemented by the database, which increases complexity vs NoSQL which offers less complexity and consistency
• Data distribution across various partition keys
• Increases the maintenance depending on database. For example DynamoDB needs less maintenance

Question 5

Implementing tradeoffs - Caching

Answer 5

• Tradeoff: memory (increased), consistency (reduced) vs fastest request times
• Use cache to increase performance
• Utilize database read replicas to reduce workload of primary servers
• Employ CloudFront as CDN to reduce latency

Question 6

Compression

Answer 6

• Tradeoff: time to compress / decompress vs memory (reduced because of size)
• Compress code assets such as CSS or Javascript
• Compress files to reduce storage and transmission time