Scale & Secure Part 2: Deep Dive into Scaling and Security

As your application grows, it's crucial to ensure that it can handle increased demand while maintaining robust security measures. In this guide, we'll explore how Xano helps you scale your backend to meet high traffic demands and implement essential security features to protect your data and application.

Scaling Your Xano Backend

Xano's scale plan provides dedicated resources that can manage a large number of users and grow with your user base, reaching millions if needed. Two key components can be scaled up to meet high traffic demands:

API Nodes

API nodes handle the business logic demands of your application. Think of them as the hosts of a party – when you have a few guests (users), one host can manage all requests. However, as more guests arrive, you need more hosts to keep up with the increasing requests and ensure everyone is served promptly.

To scale API nodes, you can add more nodes to handle the growing number of users and complex API requests, ensuring your application remains responsive and lightning-fast.

Database Nodes

Database nodes power how many users can request information from your database simultaneously. Similar to the kitchen staff at a party, if only a few guests order food (data requests), the current staff can manage. But if everyone orders at once, you need more staff to cook and serve food quickly to avoid long wait times.

By scaling database nodes horizontally (sharding data across multiple servers), you can increase capacity, enhance reliability and availability, and dynamically add more servers as needed to handle growing data and achieve faster response times.

Securing Your Xano Backend

As you scale your application, it's essential to implement robust security measures to protect your data and users. Xano offers several security features and best practices to help you achieve this:

Secure Data Storage (Encryption at Rest)

Xano implements encryption at rest, ensuring your data is encrypted on physical storage devices. Even if someone gains physical access to the hard drive, they would still need the encryption keys to decrypt the data, making it highly secure.

Secure Data Transmission (SSL/TLS)

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols encrypt data transmitted between web servers and clients, ensuring your users' personal information and credit card details remain safe during transmission.

Security Policies and Access Controls

Xano's security policies allow you to control how individuals access your instance, including authentication services, two-factor authentication (2FA), single sign-on (SSO), and IP address management.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables you to manage user permissions based on roles within your organization, ensuring team members can access only the necessary resources.

Password Encryption

Xano never stores passwords in plain text. Instead, it uses the SHA-256 algorithm with unique salts to hash and encrypt passwords, preventing unauthorized access even in the event of a security breach.

Single Tenancy

With single tenancy, your data is isolated in a dedicated environment, ensuring complete separation from other tenants. This minimizes the risk of cross-tenant breaches and optimizes system resources and stability for intensive use cases.

Middleware

Middleware is an intermediary layer that processes requests and data transfers between the front and back ends of your application. It enhances security and operational efficiency by validating incoming data, managing request flow, and enforcing access controls.

To see some of these security features in action, check out the demos for RBAC, password encryption, and middleware in the video.

By leveraging Xano's scaling and security capabilities, you can build and deploy backend services that can handle high traffic demands while maintaining robust protection for your data and users.