5 ms·

The amount of assumptions involved in all these really suggests it's mostly rationalization doesn't it? It's absolutely perfectly fine to scale to millions of

The amount of assumptions involved in all these really suggests it's mostly rationalization doesn't it? It's absolutely perfectly fine to scale to millions of users with yesterday's proven simple tech using the benefits of time passed. You got everything that was hard before in managed services, why start complicating the simplest part (stateless app servers) now that we've got everything served on a platter? I reckon 99% of the apps HN talks about that needs to "scale" can do it with VMs behind a load balancer, a cache, and a relational database. All of these are now available as managed services. Not to mention that you now got tailor made languages for it like Go that compiles to a simple single binary for your VMs to just kick off. Use the progress instead of trying to be clever. I mean, if actually producing a product is the goal, rather than a vehicle to unnecessarily squeeze in the latest tech into. There's no need to make a big up-front investment in building a platform on top of k8s etc. Spend the time on the product instead. And if you turn out to be in the 1% that's a good problem to have, and no, it won't be over night, so you're fine.

marcosdumay 2y ago
I wouldn't say it's rationalization. Surviving the initial scaling is an horrible experience, full of technical gotchas. People that have seen that will naturally want to avoid it. The problem is that it's an irrational desire, because what they do to avoid it destroys most of their chances to even get there. It looks like a manifestation of the second system syndrome.
- elktown 2y ago
  Could be indeed. I've also found it interesting how rarely I hear about actual proper load testing. Like, it doesn't need to be a horrible experience, and it can be done in a controlled setting before even launching if one wants to. But this doesn't really seem to be that common, just by judging how rarely it's brought up in the pop-software dev sphere.

marcosdumay 2y ago

I wouldn't say it's rationalization. Surviving the initial scaling is an horrible experience, full of technical gotchas. People that have seen that will naturally want to avoid it. The problem is that it's an irrational desire, because what they do to avoid it destroys most of their chances to even get there. It looks like a manifestation of the second system syndrome.

elktown 2y ago
Could be indeed. I've also found it interesting how rarely I hear about actual proper load testing. Like, it doesn't need to be a horrible experience, and it can be done in a controlled setting before even launching if one wants to. But this doesn't really seem to be that common, just by judging how rarely it's brought up in the pop-software dev sphere.