“App” is one of the big buzzwords on the Internet today, but applications are nothing new. Businesses of all sorts have relied on software programs for decades to boost efficiency and productivity. To stay competitive after the advent of the Internet, companies had to deploy attractive and high‑functioning web applications. Smartphones and mobile devices have upped the ante yet again: we’ve all come to expect that we can access the information we want from wherever we happen to be.
Not only do we expect information to be easily accessible, we want it in a hurry. Researchers have found that 40% of users abandon a website if it doesn’t load within just 3 seconds. Worse yet, 80% of those dissatisfied with a site’s performance are less likely to return, and more than a third will tell their friends about their bad experience. On an ecommerce website making $100,000 per day, a delay of only 1 second in page loading can cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
Traditional approaches to content delivery can’t keep pace with ever‑increasing demands for application acceleration. It can be prohibitively expensive to scale up proprietary hardware‑based solutions, and dividing application development and deployment between two different teams creates needless delays in the rollout of an improved web app.
So how do you continually improve the performance of your applications? Interestingly enough, the solution turns out to be the very source of the challenge: the Internet. Modern application architecture takes advantage of innovative web technologies to speed application development and delivery by giving developers and engineers end‑to‑end control. NGINX Plus is unique in that it integrates several of these technologies – web serving, load balancing, caching, streaming media, and more – into a single, proven application delivery platform.
Download our new ebook, Building the Modern Application Architecture, to discover how the right architecture can be a definitive game changer by optimizing the performance of today’s most business‑critical applications.
You’ll learn about these important milestones in the development of the modern application architecture:
- HTTP becomes the common language of the Internet, replacing proprietary communication protocols.
- Web browsers eliminate the need to develop, install, and maintain user interface software.
- The high cost and limited flexibility of proprietary, hardware‑based web technologies drives the adoption of software solutions.
- NGINX Plus integrates web serving, load balancing, caching, and media streaming into the ideal application delivery platform.