prompter: What would you need to create a scalable website? What would be the key building blocks for it?

assistant: A scalable website is one that can handle large amounts of traffic, data, and users without compromising on performance and reliability. Here are some key components that are essential for building a scalable website:

1. Cloud infrastructure: You'll need a robust cloud infrastructure like _AWS_, _Azure_, or _Google Cloud Platform_ that allows you to easily scale up or down as needed. This would include serverless functions, auto-scaling groups, and database clusters that can be easily configured and managed using cloud platforms.
2. NoSQL database: The traditional relational database is not always the best choice for scalable web applications. Instead, you may want to use a NoSQL database like _MongoDB_, _Cassandra_, or _CouchDB_ that can handle large volumes of unstructured data and scale horizontally as needed.
3. Load balancing: This is essential for distributing the load across multiple servers and ensuring that no single node becomes a bottleneck. You can use load balancers like _NGINX_, _HAProxy_, or _Apache_ that can direct traffic to the servers that have the least amount of workload.
4. Caching: Caching plays an important role in reducing the load on your database and backend servers. You can use cache systems like _Redis_, _Memcached_, or _Couchbase_ to store frequently accessed data and retrieve it quickly without hitting your database.
5. Monitoring and logging: You'll need a robust monitoring and logging system that can track the performance and usage of your application. This will help you identify any potential bottlenecks or issues before they become critical.
6. Containerization: Containerization allows you to package your application in a standardized format that can be deployed across multiple servers and platforms. You can use container management systems like _Docker_ or _Kubernetes_ to manage and orchestrate your containers.
7. Version control: Version control is an essential component of any development process. You can use tools like _Git_ or _Mercurial_ to create and manage your codebase, track changes, and collaborate with your team members.

These are the key components that you should have in place to build a scalable website. However, it's important to keep in mind that there's no single formula for building a scalable and reliable web application. The best approach will depend on your specific needs and requirements.

assistant: To create a scalable website, you will need to consider various aspects of the website's architecture, infrastructure, and design. Here are some key building blocks that you should consider:

Robust and scalable architecture: The website's architecture should be designed to handle a large volume of traffic and user requests. It should be able to scale horizontally and vertically as the traffic increases. You can use a microservices architecture, load balancing, and containerization to achieve this.

Reliable and scalable infrastructure: You should choose a reliable and scalable infrastructure for your website, such as cloud hosting services like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. This will provide you with the flexibility to scale up or down based on traffic demands.

Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN can help you distribute your website's content to users from multiple servers located in different geographical locations. This can improve the website's performance and reduce the load on your servers.

Database optimization: To make your website scalable, you should optimize your database queries, use caching, and choose a database that can handle a large number of concurrent requests. You can also consider using a NoSQL database like MongoDB, Cassandra, or DynamoDB for improved scalability.

Efficient coding practices: You should use efficient coding practices, such as caching, lazy loading, and asynchronous programming, to reduce the website's response time and improve its scalability.

Monitoring and analytics: You should monitor your website's performance and user behavior using analytics tools like Google Analytics, New Relic, or Datadog. This can help you identify performance bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions to improve scalability.

Security: A scalable website must also be secure. You should use encryption, authentication, and access controls to secure user data and prevent unauthorized access to the website.

Overall, building a scalable website requires careful planning and implementation of various building blocks. By focusing on the above key areas, you can create a website that can handle a large volume of traffic and provide an excellent user experience.

prompter: That is a lot of tech in the stack. What kind of frontend/backend ratio you recommend for the dev team?

assistant: Your question depends on the scale and scope of your project. 

For example, a shopping catalogue would obviously be more focused on having more front-end developers, whereas sites more focused on accessing data will be more focused on the backend.

So, I can't say for sure without more information about your project.

assistant: That really depends on project's scope and available resources. But usually frontend team size is a little bit larger than backend team, especially when the website has a complex or unique design. Usually, it's better to manage the frontend and backend team sizes according to the project timeline. for example in starting the project frontend team size is bigger than  backend team size and after launching and in scaling the project up, the backend team size can be much more than frontend team size.

assistant: As a rule the back-end domain tends to be bigger where there is more variance of features on a project.

In most cases backend is 2 to 5 times the size of the frontend team.

It is suggested to have 1 designer per every 10 to 20 developers

assistant: A scalable website is one that can serve an increasing number of concurrent users with minimal impact to latency or functionality.

First, you should address basic performance considerations that are relevant to any website/web application. This includes caching frequently requested data, optimizing database queries to avoid unnecessary table joins, ensuring your hardware configuration is optimal for the read/write profile of your application, and profiling your code to ensure you have not accidentally introduced pathways that are unnecessarily executing in quadratic time (or worse).

Beyond these basic performance points, there is also vertical and horizontal scalability.

"Vertical scalability" mostly refers to increasing the performance of a single piece of hardware to serve more users. This is mostly independent of the underlying website/web application, so I will assume you are not interested in that.

"Horizontal scalability" mostly refers to whether or not you are able to add (or remove) additional hardware/virtual cloud services in response to increased/decreased demand. 

Achieving horizontal scalability is not simple. Here are some examples of options for increasing horizontal scalability:
1) load balancers
2) database replication and sharding
3) containerized environments
4) microservices
5) parallelized execution

Does this answer your question?

prompter: Yes. Can you please now provide list of technologies that I need to know in order to build such scalable website myself?