4 ms·

I agree with most of this post except that you should build to scale. Scaling isn't what you should be focused on. If you focus on this you will loose sight of

I agree with most of this post except that you should build to scale. Scaling isn't what you should be focused on. If you focus on this you will loose sight of the product you should be developing and responding to user feedback.

rahulvohra 16y ago
Cloud computing has made it possible to choose a hosting provider which allows you to scale with approximately no effort.
samstokes 16y ago
You're quite right - spending significant effort on scaling when you're building an MVP is probably wrong. The point is that we got our first 10,000 users without any scaling effort. When writing this post we talked a lot about this, and the wording is quite carefully chosen: be ready to scale. Having a contingency plan in case you need to scale, however, is a good idea if it doesn't cost too much (in either money or distraction). The observation we make in the post is that cloud hosting like Heroku or Google App Engine makes it much more likely that you can be ready to scale without any substantial effort early on. Obviously the "cloud scales easily" line only gets you so far. For example, while the web tier scales easily, if you built on a relational database that will impose a limit on your magical cloud scaling powers. Once you hit that limit, you still have to face up to the fact that scaling takes care and effort. But cloud hosting lets you delay that effort until you're at a size that warrants thinking about it. Maybe we should have made this point more directly in the post: be ready to scale, because (for many applications) it no longer costs you very much.
- waratuman 16y ago
  Great response. I would say that developing on Heroku and Google App Engine drives practices that lead to the ability to scale. This can be done with any hosting provider, as long as you are ready and know what to do.

4 ms·

I agree with most of this post except that you should build to scale. Scaling isn't what you should be focused on. If you focus on this you will loose sight of

by waratuman 16y ago

rahulvohra 16y ago
Cloud computing has made it possible to choose a hosting provider which allows you to scale with approximately no effort.
samstokes 16y ago
You're quite right - spending significant effort on scaling when you're building an MVP is probably wrong. The point is that we got our first 10,000 users without any scaling effort. When writing this post we talked a lot about this, and the wording is quite carefully chosen: be ready to scale. Having a contingency plan in case you need to scale, however, is a good idea if it doesn't cost too much (in either money or distraction). The observation we make in the post is that cloud hosting like Heroku or Google App Engine makes it much more likely that you can be ready to scale without any substantial effort early on. Obviously the "cloud scales easily" line only gets you so far. For example, while the web tier scales easily, if you built on a relational database that will impose a limit on your magical cloud scaling powers. Once you hit that limit, you still have to face up to the fact that scaling takes care and effort. But cloud hosting lets you delay that effort until you're at a size that warrants thinking about it. Maybe we should have made this point more directly in the post: be ready to scale, because (for many applications) it no longer costs you very much.
- waratuman 16y ago
  Great response. I would say that developing on Heroku and Google App Engine drives practices that lead to the ability to scale. This can be done with any hosting provider, as long as you are ready and know what to do.