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> "Develop your project. Then, put it on the bare minimum architecture that it can run on (be that a 512MB instance from DigitalOcean or a medium instance on AW

> "Develop your project. Then, put it on the bare minimum architecture that it can run on (be that a 512MB instance from DigitalOcean or a medium instance on AWS). As you get more users, monitor, and modify the infrastructure appropriately to account for load and redundancy." That's a pretty ignorant and potentially short sighted statement. Look at what happened to Instagram. They almost lost it all because they hadn't planned for the possibility of handling scale quickly Sometimes you simply don't have the luxury of monitoring and modifying to account for load and redundancy. Sometimes you're monitoring says "hey traffic" shortly followed by "OMG YOU'RE SCREWED" because you can't possibly think up and implement an appropriate scalable architecture, and modify the codebase to handle it and and and while your servers are melting and everyone is yelling at you. Yes, this is very unlikely to happen, but when it does it can cost you your business if you're not prepared. Obviously apps with no networking and no viral component are far less likely to have this problem. Got a macApp that creates icon sets for XCode? Yeah, you can ignore this scaling issue. Writing the next Instagram? You're a fool if you don't have plans in place, in advance of launch, for . handling the onslaught of people that will make your business successful.

tarr11 9y ago
> Look at what happened to Instagram. They almost lost it all because they hadn't planned for the possibility of handling scale quickly I had never heard this version before. The story I heard was that they pivoted from burbn, which they felt was to cluttered and unfocused. [1] If they followed your advice, they would have built a scaled up version of burbn, which nobody would have used. [1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-billion-in-2-years-the-story-of-instagram-as-told-by-its-founders/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-billion-in-2-years-the-story-...
lucideer 9y ago
It's interesting that you choose Instagram - a highly successful company/product - as an example to warn people against. It may be harder to come up with examples of people who failed, for the obvious reason - they failed and are therefore not well known, but I really don't find the statement that Instagram "nearly lost it all" very compelling. Did they? Really? If they had had even more problems scaling, would they really have lost users? Look at Twitter, they took years to resolve issues. I actually think the importance of stability and uptime are overblown in the early stages. If I think about the times downtime has significantly impacted my view of a company or product, it's when large established services I'd come to rely on professionally went down. You need to establish a reputation for reliability before most people expect it of you. That's not to say it's not important, but you need to look at context. Noone relies on Instagram minute by minute for their professional work, so the priorities are different. UX, marketing, network effects, etc. are going to trump stability.
deleted 9y ago
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adventured 9y ago
> Look at what happened to Instagram. They almost lost it all because they hadn't planned for the possibility of handling scale quickly That's a problem that essentially nobody has. You're talking such a very small percentage of start-ups or projects, as to be meaningless as a reference point. Simply put, that isn't a problem you're going to have. If by some small miracle you have that kind of scaling problem, you can very likely fix it thanks to the fact that you've struck gold. The number of homeruns that failed because they couldn't scale, is few and far between. There are so few of them, that you're naming one that became a huge success instead of listing some huge prominent failure. First, start with the fact that there are so few of these Instagram rapid hyper-scaling scenarios to begin with, then narrow it down to the percentage that failed due to poor scaling, then narrow it down to the number of those who failed due to poor scaling in the modern cloud era (ie not Friendster from 2004-05). You're very likely down to close to zero examples.

tarr11 9y ago

> Look at what happened to Instagram. They almost lost it all because they hadn't planned for the possibility of handling scale quickly I had never heard this version before. The story I heard was that they pivoted from burbn, which they felt was to cluttered and unfocused. [1] If they followed your advice, they would have built a scaled up version of burbn, which nobody would have used. [1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-billion-in-2-years-the-story-of-instagram-as-told-by-its-founders/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-billion-in-2-years-the-story-...

lucideer 9y ago

It's interesting that you choose Instagram - a highly successful company/product - as an example to warn people against. It may be harder to come up with examples of people who failed, for the obvious reason - they failed and are therefore not well known, but I really don't find the statement that Instagram "nearly lost it all" very compelling. Did they? Really? If they had had even more problems scaling, would they really have lost users? Look at Twitter, they took years to resolve issues. I actually think the importance of stability and uptime are overblown in the early stages. If I think about the times downtime has significantly impacted my view of a company or product, it's when large established services I'd come to rely on professionally went down. You need to establish a reputation for reliability before most people expect it of you. That's not to say it's not important, but you need to look at context. Noone relies on Instagram minute by minute for their professional work, so the priorities are different. UX, marketing, network effects, etc. are going to trump stability.

deleted 9y ago

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adventured 9y ago

> Look at what happened to Instagram. They almost lost it all because they hadn't planned for the possibility of handling scale quickly That's a problem that essentially nobody has. You're talking such a very small percentage of start-ups or projects, as to be meaningless as a reference point. Simply put, that isn't a problem you're going to have. If by some small miracle you have that kind of scaling problem, you can very likely fix it thanks to the fact that you've struck gold. The number of homeruns that failed because they couldn't scale, is few and far between. There are so few of them, that you're naming one that became a huge success instead of listing some huge prominent failure. First, start with the fact that there are so few of these Instagram rapid hyper-scaling scenarios to begin with, then narrow it down to the percentage that failed due to poor scaling, then narrow it down to the number of those who failed due to poor scaling in the modern cloud era (ie not Friendster from 2004-05). You're very likely down to close to zero examples.