It’s good to finally have a name for this pattern. The first time I was aware of it, and the most ambitious implementation of it, was probably at Roomkey. I hea

It’s good to finally have a name for this pattern. The first time I was aware of it, and the most ambitious implementation of it, was probably at Roomkey. I heard about it from Colin Steele, who was CTO, and who wrote 2 detailed posts about this (I helped edit this article): https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.colinsteele.org/post/231037... Colin wrote: Similarly, Matt Mitchell, a senior developer at Room Key now, came to me saying, "Colin, there’s this tool called Solr, and I think it will make searching our hotel database much easier." Again, I can only shake my head at what happens when you hire smart people, treat them like adults, and actually listen to what they come up with. Solr quickly went from a piecewise solution to our searching needs to something far more interesting. In our problem domain, stale reads of certain data are tolerable, and exploiting that was a lever we could pull. Eventually, we ended up baking an instance of Solr/Lucene directly into our individual application processes, making it possible to achieve true linear horizontal scalability for the application. As of this writing, we’re on track to having 9 million uniques a month, from zero at the start of 2012. We did so with absolutely no fuss, no late nights, no hand wringing, and a laughably small amount of additional opex spend. But I digress.