3 ms·
I cannot help but think this all sounds pretty much like a hack (a clever one, though). We do not handle, let's say low-level I/O buffering/caching, by ourselv
by dakiol 3y ago
I cannot help but think this all sounds pretty much like a hack (a clever one, though).
We do not handle, let's say low-level I/O buffering/caching, by ourselves anymore, right? (at least the folks doing web development/saas). We rely instead of the OS APIs, and that's good. I think we are missing something similar but for db sharding. It seems to me that we are still missing some fundamental piece of technology/infrastructure to handle horizontal data sharding.
- simonw 3y agoCitus and Vitess are examples of horzontal data sharding technology for PostgreSQL and MySQL respectively. At Figma's size there are sometimes reasons to roll your own, which I think they explain pretty clearly in the article. They wanted a solution they could incrementally engineer onto their existing stack without doing a full rewrite or lift-and-shift to something else.
- yard2010 3y agoThis is Hacker News after all
- efxhoy 3y agoI’m no computer scientist but I think the fundamental problem is that the CAP theorem makes it really tricky to do in a “cost free” way. You fundamentally need to sacrifice one, at least a tiny bit.