There's undoubtedly a lot that business software developers need to consider when programming their creations. Everything from functional reliability to security to industry standards must be taken into account during the development process.
Unfortunately, according to F5's Lori MacVittie, one quality that often gets left out is speed. The IT veteran said that her work on pioneering Internet-facing applications for a transport company taught her several things in short order.
"One of the lessons I learned early on was that maintainability always won over performance, especially at the code level. Oh, some basic tenets of optimization in the code could be followed … but for the most part, many of the tricks used to improve performance were verboten, and some based solely on factors like readability," she wrote.
Because of this, according to MacVittie, there are significant hurdles to overcome for those who want to improve an application's performance by rewriting it, not least of which is that the process might involve downtime and changes for a system in use by huge numbers of employees. Companies might not be able to afford this kind of opportunity cost.
What's more, optimizing code too heavily for performance could result in it becoming difficult to understand — a critical flaw in an enterprise environment, where many different people might need to read it.
Fortunately, there's another option, she said. Application acceleration services can provide a dedicated tier in the data center devoted to load balancing and optimization — allowing IT departments to create marked improvements in performance without needing to manipulate programs at the code level.
Such systems use several techniques, MacVittie wrote, including caching, data compression, concatenation and transformation. Moreover, the performance gains realized from these specialized IT Infrastructure solutions are often more extensive than those possible with a ground-level retooling of the application in question.
The advent of cloud technology, experts agree, makes the creation of a discrete data center layer like the one needed for application acceleration far simpler than it would otherwise have been. While rapid changes in the basic architectures of IT have made for some headaches among tech workers and the occasional well-intentioned misstep, the possibilities that the cloud provides may exert a transformative influence on computing across whole industries.
