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> "You're not Google. Your company will never be Google." I'm not sure people realize this now more than then. I was there back then and we surely knew we woul

> "You're not Google. Your company will never be Google." I'm not sure people realize this now more than then. I was there back then and we surely knew we would never be Google hence we didn't need to "scale" the same way they did. Nowadays every project I start begins with a meeting where is presented a document describing the architecture we are going to implement, using AWS of course, because "auto-scale" right?, and 9/10 it includes CloudFront, which is a CDN and I don't really understand why this app I am developing, which is basically an API gateway with some customization that made Ngnix slightly less than ideal (but still perfect for the job), and that averages to 5 rps needs a CDN in front of it... (or AWS or auto-scaling or AWS lambda, for that matter)

samus 2y ago
The autoscaling is nice because a lot of performance issues just get resolved without much meddling by the ops team, buying time for proper optimizations should it get out of hand. The disadvantage is that people don't think hard about performance requirements anymore. Premature optimization is bad, but it's also a warning sign if a project has no clue whatsoever how intensely the system is going to be used.
_xiaz 2y ago
In defense of CDNs they're also pretty neat for cutting down latency, which benefits even the first customer. Of course that only helps if you don't end up shoving dozens of MBs in Javascript/JSON over the wire.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  Putting your app behind a CDN also gives you some cheap defense against (most, casual) DDoS.
  - peoplefromibiza 2y ago
    usually, but this app is not even exposed publicly to the internet
throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
5 rps aside, the more data you can push to the edge (your customer) the cheaper it will be and the better performance for you customer.
immibis 2y ago
AWS overcharges 100x for bandwidth, and CloudFront's free tier has 10x more bandwidth in it.

samus 2y ago

The autoscaling is nice because a lot of performance issues just get resolved without much meddling by the ops team, buying time for proper optimizations should it get out of hand. The disadvantage is that people don't think hard about performance requirements anymore. Premature optimization is bad, but it's also a warning sign if a project has no clue whatsoever how intensely the system is going to be used.

_xiaz 2y ago

In defense of CDNs they're also pretty neat for cutting down latency, which benefits even the first customer. Of course that only helps if you don't end up shoving dozens of MBs in Javascript/JSON over the wire.

ElevenLathe 2y ago
Putting your app behind a CDN also gives you some cheap defense against (most, casual) DDoS.
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  usually, but this app is not even exposed publicly to the internet

throwaway7ahgb 2y ago

5 rps aside, the more data you can push to the edge (your customer) the cheaper it will be and the better performance for you customer.

immibis 2y ago

AWS overcharges 100x for bandwidth, and CloudFront's free tier has 10x more bandwidth in it.