ARCHITECTURAL SOLUTIONS FOR SCALABLE WEB APPLICATIONS CONSIDERING PERFORMANCE AND LATENCY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35546/kntu2078-4481.2025.3.2.53Keywords:
scalable web applications, microservices, serverless, edge computing, Kubernetes, latency, performance optimization, CI/CD, cloud architectureAbstract
The rapid growth of digital services and the increasing demands of globally distributed users place scalability, performance, and latency optimization at the center of web application design. Ensuring high performance under growing workloads is critical for business process stability, user satisfaction, and system efficiency.The goal of the study is to compare four architectural paradigms of web applications – monolithic, microservices, serverless, and edge computing – under workloads simulating realistic e-commerce scenarios, including concurrent transactions, product searches, and payment requests, to assess their behavior in terms of scalability, performance, and latency.As a result, the study revealed clear differences in system behavior across the four paradigms. Monolithic systems, while predictable and simple to operate, quickly became saturated under load, with response times exceeding 900 ms at 1,500 concurrent users and reaching over 3 seconds at peak capacity. Microservices extended the range of scalability, maintaining stable performance up to 3,000–3,500 users with average delays of 420–600 ms; however, at higher concurrency, orchestration overhead caused sharp increases in latency. Serverless platforms demonstrated the highest elasticity, scaling almost instantly to 6,200 requests per second and effectively handling burst traffic, though latency spikes up to 1,000 ms occurred due to cold starts and execution variability. Edge deployments achieved the lowest latency overall, remaining below 300 ms even at 5,000 users, and providing peak throughput of 5,400 requests per second, albeit requiring significant provisioning and introducing greater operational complexity. The findings indicate that no single architectural paradigm fully satisfies both scalability and latency requirements across diverse workload profiles. Hybrid strategies that combine microservices for core stability, serverless for unpredictable bursts, and edge computing for latency-sensitive operations were found to deliver the most balanced outcomes, ensuring responsiveness, stability, and cost-aware scalability.Conclusions: flexible architectural approaches enable high performance, stability, and scalability of web applications while optimizing latency and operational costs. The findings emphasize the importance of architectural adaptability for building resilient and efficient web applications in modern digital ecosystems.
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