It’s astounding how many people that work in infrastructure should understand things like this but don’t, particularly network bottlenecks or bottlenecks in gen

It’s astounding how many people that work in infrastructure should understand things like this but don’t, particularly network bottlenecks or bottlenecks in general. I’ve seen situations where someone wants to increase the number of replicas for some service because the frontend is 504’ing, but the real reason is because the database has become saturated by the calls from the service. It is possible (a little unlikely, but possible, and the rule with infra at scale is “unlikely” always becomes “certain”) to actually make the problem worse by scaling up there. The number of blank stares I get when explaining things like this is demoralizing sometimes, especially in consulting situations where you have some pig headed engineer manager that thinks he knows everything about everything.