Data-Intensive, Compute-Intensive Apps System Design

Key Takeaways

Instagram and weather simulation apps both run on the server but in order to scale them the approaches are pretty much different because when your app is slow because it is reading and writing too much data those kind of applications are called data inensive applications and when in your app the calculations are pretty heavy those are called compute intensive applications. In order to scale a data inensive application, you can do various operations like adding caches strategies, maybe add caching systems, add databases, sh the databases or maybe replication. These all helps in scaling a data inensive application. But in order to scale a compute inensive application, you need to add the power to CPU or GPU. Suppose in a game if your character is standing and the shadow is on the left side because the sun is on the right. It can't be handled through databases. You need computational powers only. That's why some of the high-end games performs very poorly when you have a degraded system. You can't do anything but to add more CPU powers in order to work with them. So yeah, these are the two applications on which we have to first think and then pick the components wisely. For more such system design content, please subscribe to Terescu.