3 ms·

The scale part of the cloud is often not as exciting as it seems on paper. Yes a cloud can auto-scale 100x. But can everything else support that? Like is your

The scale part of the cloud is often not as exciting as it seems on paper. Yes a cloud can auto-scale 100x. But can everything else support that? Like is your DB setup to handle 100x increase in load? (Sure, use dynamo DB, but that has other restrictions). If the cloud to bare metal price difference is 10x.. you could easily just buy bare metal = 2x your peak load, and still come out ahead..

dvaun 5y ago
What you state makes sense. For me, I haven't worked in an environment (yet) that would need to handle fluctuating loads at scale—so my comment is my own speculation based on my experience working for smaller businesses with MUCH less data and bandwidth usage compared to those mentioned here. And that's why I come to HN, lobsters, etc :) so that I can read and learn from others' experiences...
- freedomben 5y ago
  I've worked with dozens of different companies, and it's pretty rare to truly have such crazy variance in load.
  - kazen44 5y ago
    also, the moment it does happen you usually have non technical systems which are even harder to scale. (customer support for instance, or your sales/billing pipeline).
- brianwawok 5y ago
  Honestly, a lot of people overengineer the scaling thing. Google really does need a service that can scale to 100M users. I doubt someone starting a SaaS to make garbage truck software needs to. Or at a minimum, at the time they need that kind of scale, they will have plenty of money to throw at hardware. It's amazing how many users a single maxed DB can handle.
viraptor 5y ago
If you go for horizontal scaling like that, indeed everything needs to be adjusted. If you're asking "is your DB setup to handle 100x increase in load" then likely the answer is no. "How do you shard your writes" is likely a better question then... Aggressive autoscaling requires different thinking.
- Raidion 5y ago
  Depends on how many times you've scaled 100x already. 1 user to 100 users is 100x, 100 users to 10k users is 100x, 10k users to 1 million users is 100x. Aurora serverless autoscaling can handle a LOT, depending on the architecture and use case.

dvaun 5y ago

What you state makes sense. For me, I haven't worked in an environment (yet) that would need to handle fluctuating loads at scale—so my comment is my own speculation based on my experience working for smaller businesses with MUCH less data and bandwidth usage compared to those mentioned here. And that's why I come to HN, lobsters, etc :) so that I can read and learn from others' experiences...

freedomben 5y ago
I've worked with dozens of different companies, and it's pretty rare to truly have such crazy variance in load.
- kazen44 5y ago
  also, the moment it does happen you usually have non technical systems which are even harder to scale. (customer support for instance, or your sales/billing pipeline).
brianwawok 5y ago
Honestly, a lot of people overengineer the scaling thing. Google really does need a service that can scale to 100M users. I doubt someone starting a SaaS to make garbage truck software needs to. Or at a minimum, at the time they need that kind of scale, they will have plenty of money to throw at hardware. It's amazing how many users a single maxed DB can handle.

viraptor 5y ago

If you go for horizontal scaling like that, indeed everything needs to be adjusted. If you're asking "is your DB setup to handle 100x increase in load" then likely the answer is no. "How do you shard your writes" is likely a better question then... Aggressive autoscaling requires different thinking.

Raidion 5y ago
Depends on how many times you've scaled 100x already. 1 user to 100 users is 100x, 100 users to 10k users is 100x, 10k users to 1 million users is 100x. Aurora serverless autoscaling can handle a LOT, depending on the architecture and use case.