3 ms·

Something that only works for huge sizes isn't scalable by definition. Scalable means it can scale up or down

• kaliszad 6y ago
  Great point! Actually "scalable" in any direction is meaningless until you provide the scale, performance, reliability, cost and time requirements you have to consider while scaling. A single server for a typical web workload is just fine, if you don't need to be up more than ~ 99,9% of time, if you don't have more than 10s of thousands of users. Considering the availability, you could e.g. reboot into a smaller or larger VM. (I know, this is crazy to write on HN but a single virtual server is plenty reliable for most things if you are able to do a very fast recovery from backup to limit the extent of a disaster.) :-) If you don't consider "serverless", it really doesn't get much better than a single server considering cost. If you want more reliability/ availability and more performance, you probably have to take other approaches. E.g. more servers, services like S3/ lambda, maybe a mainframe (cluster) in certain situations etc.
• ncallaway 6y ago
  I disagree to an extent. Very few solutions are scalable across an entire range of a problem space. Something being scalable, to me, means that it can cover a _broad_ range of the problem space, but doesn't imply it covers 100% of it. If we imagine that the "problem space" is managing software projects from 1 person up through 1,000,000 people and you told me that there was a solution that worked for the range of 50-1,000,000 people I would describe it as scalable, even if I wouldn't recommend it to a 5 person team.