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From One Server to Exam-Day Ready
Tutorial Series

From One Server to Exam-Day Ready

A five-part real-world case study of taking a growing exam and course platform (NovaCommerce, a fictional name) to high availability on DigitalOcean: the starting point, scaling the application layer, the database and AI data layer, Valkey, workers and logging, and the testing that shaped the final architecture.

5 articles~69 min total
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Part 1: What High Availability Really Meant for NovaCommerce

A fictional exam platform with real numbers: one frontend server, two fixed backends, one database node and two powered-off standbys. Part 1 defines high availability and shows how the bottleneck kept moving.

Anichur Rahaman13 min3
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Part 2: Two Load Balancers, Two Pools, and Why Adding Servers Was Not Enough

How we rebuilt the application layer of an exam platform: two load balancers, two autoscale pools, a Next.js frontend with two containers per node, a tag-based backend, a CPU metric that lags 5 to 8 minutes, and a rollout with 219 probes and 0 errors.

Anichur Rahaman13 min4
3

Part 3: A Smaller, Cheaper, Highly Available Database in 26 Minutes, and Why AI Got Its Own PostgreSQL

We moved one big MySQL node to a cheaper Standard cluster with a standby in a 26-minute window, split reads to the standby and gave AI its own PostgreSQL with pgvector. The real exam evening showed the database was never the bottleneck.

Anichur Rahaman12 min5
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Part 4: Valkey, Queues and Logs, the Quiet Parts That Break First

Part 4 of the NovaCommerce case study: 2,854 Valkey timeouts, one worker that is still a single point of failure, a queue that delayed merit cards by 115 minutes, an AI provider that said no, and a rate limiter that counted the building.

Anichur Rahaman13 min3
5

Part 5: Measure, Change, Measure Again: Load Tests, a Real Exam Night and the Final Architecture

Seven measurements, one real exam evening and one scale-in mistake: how load tests, a capacity model and an honest soak plan shaped the final NovaCommerce architecture, its cost, and a Solutions Architect's checklist. Part 5 closes the series.

Anichur Rahaman18 min2