Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

The truth is in the middle. I've now had two startups where I came in to fix things where the system would fall over if there were more than 1 user. Literally; no transactional logic and messy interactions with the database combined with a front end engineers just making a mess of doing a backend.

In one case the database was "mongo realm", which was something our Android guy randomly picked. No transactions, no security, and 100% of the data was synced client side. Also there was no IOS and web UI. Easiest decision ever to scrap that because it was slow, broken, and there wasn't really a lot there to salvage. And I needed those other platforms supported. It's the combination of over and under engineering that is problematic. There were some tears but about six months later we had replaced 100% of the software with something that actually worked.

In both cases, I ended up just junking the backend system and replacing it with something boring but sane. In both cases getting that done was easy and fast. I love simple. I love monoliths. So no Kubernetes or any of that micro services nonsense. Because that's the opposite of simple. Which usually just means more work that doesn't really add any value.

In a small startup you should spend most of your time iterating on the UX and your product. Like really quickly. You shouldn't get too attached to anything you have. The questions that should be in the back of your mind is 1) how much time would it take a competent team to replicate what you have? and 2) would they end up with a better product?

Those questions should lead your decision making. Because if the answers are "not long" and "yes", you should just wipe out the technical debt you have built up and do things properly. Because otherwise somebody else will do it for you if it really is that good of an idea.

I've seen a lot of startups that get hung up on their own tech when it arguably isn't that great. They have the right ideas and vision but can't execute because they are stuck with whatever they have. That's usually when I get involved actually. The key characteristic of great UX is that things are simple. Which usually also means they are simple to realize if you know what you are doing.

Cumulative effort does not automatically add up to value; often it actually becomes the main obstacle to creating value. Often the most valuable outcome of building software is actually just proving the concept works. Use that to get funding, customer revenue, etc. A valid decision is to then do it properly and get a good team together to do it.

like != need

I agree with this if you are talking fb/google scale; you will very likely not even get close to that, ever. But millions of users, depending on how it hits the servers over time, is really not very much. I run a site with well over 1m active users, but it runs on $50/mo worth of VPSs with an LB and devving for it doesn't take a millisecond longer than for a non scaling version.

How does that relate to the scenario and what of the templates?

All infrastructure please.

I'm currently wrestling a stupid orchestration problem - DNS external from my domain controllers - because the architecture astronaut thought we'd need to innovate on a pillar of the fucking internet