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Smart database proxies may not be familiar to many people, and it's a shame because they can solve many difficult problems elegantly. This article explains what they are, what they do, and when they are useful.
Let me start with a seemingly unrelated topic: web pages. Bear with me, it will all come together in a minute.
Do you ever have those moments where you know you’re thinking faster than the app you’re using? You click something and have time to think “what’s taking so long?” It’s frustrating, to say the least, but it’s an all-too-common problem in modern applications. A driving factor of this delay is latency, caused by offloading processing from the app to an external server. More often than not, that external server is a monolithic database residing in a single cloud region. This article will dig into some of the existing architectures that cause this issue and provide solutions on how to resolve them.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s define “latency.” In a general sense, latency measures the duration between an action and a response. In user-facing applications, that can be narrowed down to the delay between when a user makes a request and when the application responds to a request. As a user, I don’t really care what is causing the delay resulting in a poor user experience; I just want it to go away. In a typical cloud application architecture, latency is caused by the internet and the time it takes to make requests back and forth from the user’s device and the cloud, referred to as internet latency. There is also processing time to consider; the time it takes to actually execute the request, which is referred to as operational latency. This article will focus on internet latency with a hint of operational latency. If you’re interested in other types of latency, TechTarget has a good deep dive into specifics of the term.