Web Application Case Studies You Must Read

Have you ever wondered how the largest web apps of the world scale improve performance or maintain their apps? You may have to come to one or more often through social networks. The same happened to me as well. However, I was very much curious to learn more. Thus, I looked for and compiled a list of case studies I have recently been lucky enough to be able to read through. And obviously, I enjoyed them a lot! I thought I would share it with my beloved readers so that you might get clearer pictures as well. However, I would like to call this list an in-progress one, as I intend to read more and come back here to add them as well. Here is my list of web application case studies!

Technology Stacks:

Instagram:

Being the most popular image-sharing mobile app, Instagram is doing a great job maintaining its back-end web application, which faces tons of API request loads every day. In a blog post, they explained in detail their server configuration, database, monitoring services, etc. Though it’s a few years old, it’s definitely a good read for thirsty developers.

What Powers Instagram

Spotify:

If you have an idea about a streaming app, and given the popularity of Spotify, which streams millions of songs every day around the world, you might get a glance at how insanely heavy it has to handle. In their engineering blog, they explained a high-level overview of their server architecture and infrastructure. Read on!

BackEnd Infrastructure At Spotify

Stack-Exchange:

The most popular question/answer network on the planet has an infographic-styled page explaining its server stack, which is behind the secret of its high-performance responsive web application. Though they named the page ‘performance,’ it seemed to me more in the technology stack category.

Stack Exchange’s High-Performance Server Stack

Trello:

The popular task management tool has explained its technology stacks in detail. If you have been missing the UI/front end engineering so far, this is going to be a great read for you.

Technology Stack At Trello

Performances:

Smashing Magazine:

If you are a front-end developer, I bet you are a regular visitor of Smashing Magazine, a website with extensive and useful front-end resources. In their case study blog post, among all the web application case studies mentioned in this post so far, they mostly focused on front-end performance discussions, which will be your favorite if you are a front-end developer.

Improving Smashing Magazine’s Performance

Github:

Who is a developer but hasn’t heard of Github? It should be hard to find. Github has a dedicated blog site, mostly about engineering topics. In one such blog post, they discussed how they improved their MySQL performance. Don’t miss it!

Making MySQL Better at GitHub

Symfony:

Symfony is a popular PHP web application framework. The team behind it explained how they served a billion requests per week.

Handling A billion requests a week with symfony2

Final Words:

I hope you enjoyed the list of web application case studies. As I mentioned at first, I will add other stories as I come along. If you already have read something interesting and missing from this post, feel free to share it via comments. I will try my best to add them to the main post as soon as possible! Happy Coding!