AKF cube for analyzing application scalability

AKF cube is an interesting concept to analyze how we can scale software. The cube has 3 dimensions x, y, and z representing three different ways of scale a software solution.

x-axis or mirroring: This axis states the simplest form of scaling that is creating more copied of the same solution for faster and wider access. For application scaling, we will add more servers with a copy of the application and load balance the traffic. This will have obvious challenges to maintain the session related information if applicable to the solution. Scaling data can be more challenging as just creating copies of the database will need you to keep them in sync all the time.

y-axis or Functional decomposition: This is more of service-oriented architecture’s axis. We divide application info functions or services. If a particular service is being used heavily, we will need to create copies of only that service and

z-axis or Dividing based on logical division (of data): This is scaling based on data. For example, you need to support multiple geographies, so you copy complete code to different deployments. It is as good as a replica of the same application based divided based on data needs.

References: http://microservices.io/articles/scalecube.html