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There is another aspect to this - if you're working on a startup that will scale, if successful - not to FAANG scale, but let's say many millions of DAUs and th

There is another aspect to this - if you're working on a startup that will scale, if successful - not to FAANG scale, but let's say many millions of DAUs and thousands of QPS on the servers - you also want to build some kind of future proofing into your architecture. And then begins the dance of balancing what we currently need (we have maybe 100K DAU and launched recently) and what we predict we might need if things go right. So you don't need to go full on K8S with some crazy sharded database and 50 microservices on day 1, but you also don't want a PHP/MySQL monolith if you're building something that works like, say, Twitter, because you'll have to scrap ALL of that under huge pressure if things start to take off.

peterangular 4y ago
> 100K DAU > but you also don't want a PHP/MySQL monolith if you're building something that works like, say, Twitter This is a lot of whiplash in regards to discussing size. I just want to say... 100K DAU with a PHP/MySQL monolith is 100% possible - I'm certain a lot of people here have achieved this without much problem. Things like Nginx, PHP-FPM, reverse-proxy-caching, load balancing to stateless application servers, read replica, offloading static assets to CDN, blah blah... I digress but you can 100% hit 100K DAU with a traditional PHP/MySQL monolith.
- dvirsky 4y ago
  Yes, my point is it will hold, but it won't hold 50M users, and if you take off you'll be scrambling to rewrite it from scratch. So a flexible architecture that is simple but can scale (as an architecture) might be a better choice than the simplest possible design you can make.
ativzzz 4y ago
Could not disagree more. If you are a startup that is struggling to survive, it is an absolute waste of resources to overengineer your app for potential scale. It's the VC way to burn all of the money hiring talented infra engineers to manage this, but it is not pragmatic at all. The exception is if your startup is literally a high volume data processing platform or something similar. That simple PHP/MySQL or rails monolith will scale much further than you think by throwing more servers at it without having to hire an army of devops engineers. Solving problems you don't currently have when your company is not profitable is a waste of money.
mwcampbell 4y ago
Maybe the monolith shouldn't use PHP and MySQL. But what about, say, a high-performance managed runtime (e.g. JVM or CLR) and SQLite? Expensify's findings [1] suggest that with vertical scaling, SQLite can go very far. [1]: https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a-single-server/ https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-q...

peterangular 4y ago

> 100K DAU > but you also don't want a PHP/MySQL monolith if you're building something that works like, say, Twitter This is a lot of whiplash in regards to discussing size. I just want to say... 100K DAU with a PHP/MySQL monolith is 100% possible - I'm certain a lot of people here have achieved this without much problem. Things like Nginx, PHP-FPM, reverse-proxy-caching, load balancing to stateless application servers, read replica, offloading static assets to CDN, blah blah... I digress but you can 100% hit 100K DAU with a traditional PHP/MySQL monolith.

dvirsky 4y ago
Yes, my point is it will hold, but it won't hold 50M users, and if you take off you'll be scrambling to rewrite it from scratch. So a flexible architecture that is simple but can scale (as an architecture) might be a better choice than the simplest possible design you can make.

ativzzz 4y ago

Could not disagree more. If you are a startup that is struggling to survive, it is an absolute waste of resources to overengineer your app for potential scale. It's the VC way to burn all of the money hiring talented infra engineers to manage this, but it is not pragmatic at all. The exception is if your startup is literally a high volume data processing platform or something similar. That simple PHP/MySQL or rails monolith will scale much further than you think by throwing more servers at it without having to hire an army of devops engineers. Solving problems you don't currently have when your company is not profitable is a waste of money.

mwcampbell 4y ago

Maybe the monolith shouldn't use PHP and MySQL. But what about, say, a high-performance managed runtime (e.g. JVM or CLR) and SQLite? Expensify's findings [1] suggest that with vertical scaling, SQLite can go very far. [1]: https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a-single-server/ https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-q...