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Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

tailscale.com

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Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#41

Post by crazygringo »

1dom wrote: post #5

No issues using headscale and selfhosted derp servers. Tailscale is great technology and protocol and facilitates decentralisation. Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth. The headline here is business breaks tech, again.

> Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth.

No it's not. It's often a recognition that just one or two, maybe three companies will end up dominating a particular market simply due to economies of scale and network effects... and so the choice is between hypergrowth to try to attain/keep the #1 or #2 position, or else go out of business and lose all the time, money, and effort you already put into it.

Nothing whatsoever makes it unsustainable. You might be offering cheaper prices during hypergrowth -- those are unsustainable -- but then you raise prices back to sustainable levels afterwards. And consumers got to benefit from the subsidized prices, yay! The business is entirely sustainable, however.

Uber is the poster child of hypergrowth. They became profitable in 2023. And their stock price has ~doubled since. Totally sustainable.

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#42

Post by ljm »

internetter wrote: post #36
rapnie wrote: post #24

In addition hypergrowth isn't needed. Grow naturally and healthy or just be sustainable, that's okay too.

Hypergrowth can be natural. Random example but what if you designed a microblogging service and all of the sudden the biggest platform gets bought by a facist and users come flocking? You could start turning users away or you could work as fast as you can to accommodate them and make small mistakes along the way. Both of these are reasonable decisions and neither one is really wrong.

That's demand driven and organic, at least, and it's not the first thing that comes to mind with hypergrowth, it's just scale.

Instead, I think of hypergrowth as a supply-side attempt to capture a larger market in a highly inorganic way and to also capture the absurdly high valuation that comes with it. Usually through VC.

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#43

Post by internetter »

ljm wrote: post #42
internetter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypergrowth can be natural. Random example but what if you designed a microblogging service and all of the sudden the biggest platform gets bought by a facist and users come flocking? You could start turning users away or you could work as fast as you can to accommodate them and make small mistakes along the way. Both of these are reasonable decisions and neither one is really wrong.

That's demand driven and organic, at least, and it's not the first thing that comes to mind with hypergrowth, it's just scale. Instead, I think of hypergrowth as a supply-side attempt to capture a larger market in a highly inorganic way and to also capture the absurdly high valuation that comes with it. Usually through VC.

I think what you are referring to is the economical model of growth at all costs (for this I use the term blitzscaling)

I think of hyperscaling as more like growth faster than what the team can manage, for any reason.

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#44

Post by flkiwi »

Interesting post. I appreciate their candor and self-criticism, but, as a customer, I'm consistently surprised by how robust Tailscale ends up being, and how rarely I've experienced an issue that actually broke my tailnet. The sort of downtime that might keep me from accessing the admin tool or something else like that is rare enough, but my nodes have almost (?) never failed to talk to each other. Pretty great.

Caveat: I have a very small tailnet (<100 nodes). Anyone running with thousands of nodes may have a very different experience where inconvenience might be existential.

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#46

Post by [deleted] »

internetter wrote: post #36
rapnie wrote: post #24

In addition hypergrowth isn't needed. Grow naturally and healthy or just be sustainable, that's okay too.

Hypergrowth can be natural. Random example but what if you designed a microblogging service and all of the sudden the biggest platform gets bought by a facist and users come flocking? You could start turning users away or you could work as fast as you can to accommodate them and make small mistakes along the way. Both of these are reasonable decisions and neither one is really wrong.

[deleted]

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#47

Post by ljm »

internetter wrote: post #43
ljm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's demand driven and organic, at least, and it's not the first thing that comes to mind with hypergrowth, it's just scale. Instead, I think of hypergrowth as a supply-side attempt to capture a larger market in a highly inorganic way and to also capture the absurdly high valuation that comes with it. Usually through VC.

I think what you are referring to is the economical model of growth at all costs (for this I use the term blitzscaling) I think of hyperscaling as more like growth faster than what the team can manage, for any reason.

Virality would be a factor in this too, which is totally demand-side even if there are levers that can be pulled to induce it artificially, but that's getting towards dead internet theory and engagement-bait I think and it's more on the media/consumption side of things.

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#48

Post by dwoldrich »

wolttam wrote: post #27

Kind of annoying to read. No, the P in CAP theorem isn’t when the client can’t connect to your unavailable service. That would be the A. Maybe it was down because of a P on your side, but don’t start blaming your downtime on network partitions between the client and your service. Edit: your service going down and not being able to take requests from clients does not a network partition make

Isn't Availablility the ability to connect to something? If I'm calling from region A to region A servers, and the region A servers' networks go down. Well, my client is clever and can failover to region B servers. Except, all my state and context was on region A servers, and maybe that state wasn't replicated over to region B - that replication might only happen on a nightly basis.

When I reconnect, my dating profile is missing all the pictures I uploaded of me in my new convertible with me lowering my sunglasses and winking at the camera.

The LovinHuggin.com server architecture is Available, but not Partition Tolerant. And after I upload different pictures of me in tuxedos and talking like a boss on the cellphone to region B, I've potentially created a weird "split brain" situation. Region A and region B servers have different views of me. Both views are super hot, but the client might get confused if my session returns to region A when their network heals, and the nightly region replication might be messy with reconciling the split brain. Eventual consistency is a helpful (or fraught) feature to have in the database when things like split brain happen.

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#49

Post by 1dom »

cael450 wrote: post #37
1dom wrote: post #5

No issues using headscale and selfhosted derp servers. Tailscale is great technology and protocol and facilitates decentralisation. Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth. The headline here is business breaks tech, again.

> Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth. The headline here is business breaks tech, again. That just isn't true. Plenty of services do just fine after experiencing hypergrowth, and a few outages are not an example of tech breaking. That's a fairly common occurrence.

I'm not saying companies can't do fine in many respects after experiencing hypergrowth, but like you said, that's after hypergrowth - the hypergrowth isn't sustainable.

And I disagree: outages are a fairly literal example of tech breaking. A few outages aren't catastrophic though, and I agree are fairly common. I know it's cliche, but "move fast and break things" might get growth, but it also gets broken things along the way.

Hypergrowth is growth and churn at the expense of sustainability and stability. It can definitely be fun though!

Re: Hypergrowth isn’t always easy

#50

Post by zackify »

It makes me wonder why they do not allow you to have a failover that is in your own tailnet. Ex: let me use one of my servers as the control plane, if stuff goes down let that coordinate everything. Maybe its too close to self hosting for them to do it?
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