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> Why? They had a 12 factor -ish app that scaled the normal way So, yes, horizontal scaling is good, especially for stateless workloads - but that doesn't mean

> Why? They had a 12 factor -ish app that scaled the normal way So, yes, horizontal scaling is good, especially for stateless workloads - but that doesn't mean you run the most hopelessly under-performing code imaginable on each node, so you basically have to scale out like this! I mean, seriously, 4000 containers to serve 4000 concurrent requests? I mean, I can't even... I honestly can't believe the attempts in this thread to justify such an utterly, horrendously bad architecture - there are 1001 better, simpler even, ways to approach this. Yes, premature optimisation is bad, but optimisation here was nowhere near premature.

jrockway 7y ago
I'm going to disagree. When you start a business, you have no idea what it's going to grow into, or if it's going to grow. So you start simple. The design was good enough for there to one day be too many customers. That is huge. When this happened, they started a second copy of their app, and could now handle twice as many customers. Repeat 3998 more times. Now the toy app is making some real money, so you can afford to deep-dive into the system and fix the technical problems. They avoided the real issue that kills startups, having a customer call you because they want to buy your service and you saying "sorry, we aren't accepting any new customers right now because Hacker News comments don't like our software architectures."