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Reminded me of something I have been thinking about lately: a centralization-cost curve. The engineering problems that go into building things of a certain scal
by _xnmw 3y ago
Reminded me of something I have been thinking about lately: a centralization-cost curve. The engineering problems that go into building things of a certain scale eventually become more expensive than simply breaking up the problem into smaller pieces. It may be much easier and cheaper to build 2 buildings 59 floors high compared to one 118-floor building, but not cheaper or easier compared to 118 one-floor buildings.
Example from tech: Amazon S3 and cloud services in general. They benefit from economies of scale, but only to a certain extent. And I have a hunch we are reaching hard limits on what AWS can handle. S3 in particular may be at a breaking point as I have noticed that the cost and speed of storing data there is now ridiculously bad.
- Gigachad 3y agoI think this is generally agreed on. Most super tall buildings are heavily state funded and used more of a show piece demonstrating the prosperity and ability of the city. Commercially they just aren’t reasonable. China for example has stopped building these super tall sky scrapers because it’s far more economical to build lots of 40 level buildings than a few 100+ level ones.
- _xnmw 3y agoInteresting how these generally accepted principles among “real” engineers are still poorly understood by software engineers. I always knew something like Heroku could never work reliably at a certain scale. The limits and tradeoffs of building something like an S3 are rarely even discussed.
- Gigachad 3y agoThis doesn’t really seem to translate across at all. Widely in software it seems it really is easier and more cost efficient to have a few super platforms than thousands of small ones. Like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord were able to absorb the hundreds of thousands of old school forums. And they still run faster and cheaper than the sum of all those individual run sites. For buildings it’s tricky because the additional height and weight create lots of new problems.
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoCan you elaborate on Heroku and S3?
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoSoftware engineers aren’t in the the same domain. s3 too hard to scale? Scale horizontally, have a directory service (DNS does perfectly fine!), and that’s a lot do the problem solved. It’s tantalisingly poetic and contrarian to try to draw more of a comparison here, but in a software systems context what you’re really talking about is decentralising your state, which is…WELL established as a scaling mechanic already.