Daniel McCray

For the client application, we don't require any of the latest APIs for the targeted devices (iPhone & Android) as the app uses "static-like" features such as camera and files at this time. Flutter also supports ffmpeg, enabling native compression on files. Flutter's flexibility is a key determinant of why we choose Flutter over native solutions.

If you were to create a large-scale app on a level that rivals Facebook in popularity, in-depth, describe how you would you make the backend infrastructure. How would you go about your servers, data, etc which are built to be scalable?

My days of using Firebase are over! I want to move to something scalable and possibly less cheap. In the past seven days I have done my research on what type of DB best fits my needs, and have chosen to go with the nonrelational DB; MongoDB. Although I understand it, I need help understanding how to set up the architecture. I have the client app (Flutter/ Dart) that would make HTTP requests to the web server (node/express), and from there the webserver would query data from MongoDB.

How should I go about hosting the web server and MongoDb; do they have to be hosted together (this is where a lot of my confusion is)? Based on the research I've done, it seems like the standard practice would be to host on a VM provided by services such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, etc. If there are better ways, such as possibly self-hosting (more responsibility), should I? Anyways, I just want to confirm with a community (you guys) to make sure I do this right, all input is highly appreciated.