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How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

blog.algomaster.io

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Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#51

Post by lelanthran »

sofixa wrote: post #49
Nextgrid wrote: post #15

Good post in general but some caveats: 1) His user numbers are off by an order of magnitude at least, as other comments have mentioned. Even a VM/VPS should handle more, and a modern bare-metal server will do way more than the quoted numbers. 2) Autoscaling is a solution to the self-inflicted problem of insanely-high cloud prices, which cloud providers love because implementing it requires more reliance on proprietar…

> Autoscaling is a solution to the self-inflicted problem of insanely-high cloud prices, which cloud providers love because implementing it requires more reliance on proprietary vendor-specific APIs. The actual solution is a handful of modern bare-metal servers at strategic locations which allow you to cover your worst-case expected load while being cheaper than the lowest expected load on a cloud And how do you pred…

> And how do you predict with certainty your "highest expected load"? And if you're in a space like ecommerce, where you have 1 week out of the year with x10 or x50 the load, I doubt it would actually be cheaper than using autoscaling.

If you know when that week is, where's the problem in spinning up extra capacity just for that period, a week in advance?

Retailers, whether online or not, know with a very high confidence what their expected load is going to be a week from now.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#52

Post by throwaway150 »

I come to HN to read thoughtful posts written by humans. Why are we upvoting LLM slop to the front page?

It is frustrating that the awesome article about Nonograms currently has less than 70 upvotes. But this pure LLM slop has 100+ upvotes and counting! What would it take to stop this LLM slop infestation?

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#53

Post by sofixa »

lelanthran wrote: post #51
sofixa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autoscaling is a solution to the self-inflicted problem of insanely-high cloud prices, which cloud providers love because implementing it requires more reliance on proprietary vendor-specific APIs. The actual solution is a handful of modern bare-metal servers at strategic locations which allow you to cover your worst-case expected load while being cheaper than the lowest expected load on a cloud And how do you pred…

> And how do you predict with certainty your "highest expected load"? And if you're in a space like ecommerce, where you have 1 week out of the year with x10 or x50 the load, I doubt it would actually be cheaper than using autoscaling. If you know when that week is, where's the problem in spinning up extra capacity just for that period , a week in advance? Retailers, whether online or not, know with a very high confi…

But you have to buy those servers, set them up, use them for that week, and then they're left idle for the whole of the year.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#54

Post by KellyCriterion »

sumitkumar wrote: post #44
mbb70 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is often stated, microservices is a solution for scaling an engineering org to 100s of developers, not for scaling a product to millions of users.

Microservices is bad for teams without discipline to implement "separation of concerns". They hope that physical network boundaries will force the discipline they couldn't maintain in a single codebase. While microservices force physical separation, they don't stop "Spaghetti Architecture." Instead of messy code, you end up with "Distributed Spaghetti," where the dependencies are hidden in network calls and shared da…

> and shared databases.

According to my understanding this is one of the reasons why microservices were invented, to prevent shared databases?

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#56

Post by Nextgrid »

sofixa wrote: post #53
lelanthran wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how do you predict with certainty your "highest expected load"? And if you're in a space like ecommerce, where you have 1 week out of the year with x10 or x50 the load, I doubt it would actually be cheaper than using autoscaling. If you know when that week is, where's the problem in spinning up extra capacity just for that period , a week in advance? Retailers, whether online or not, know with a very high confi…

But you have to buy those servers, set them up, use them for that week, and then they're left idle for the whole of the year.

You don’t need to buy them, you can get them from AWS for that period only. Doesn’t mean your whole stack needs to be on AWS.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#57

Post by Nextgrid »

steveBK123 wrote: post #42
Nextgrid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest how do you get the authority to make those decisions and have the existing developers continue working productively after this? To me it seems like microservices (or cloud, or whatever) is often overused for career/buzzword reasons. The engineers pushing for it aren't asking for your advice, they want to build an engineering playground - denying them the opportunity is unlikely to suddenly make them p…

> their original idea was to play with shiny tech instead This is a behavior I would say is very hard to manage out of people and should be screened for aggressively in interviews.

This behavior is self-inflicted by a decade of low pay and lack of significant raises to reward seniority.

The most effective way to increase income for a developer is to join a place, rack up as many buzzwords as possible and leave after 2-3 years, using those buzzwords to secure a higher-paying role somewhere else. Rinse and repeat until you get a management position where you can use politics to increase your income instead.

If you want guys that use boring tech to drive the business forward you have to pay them upfront the money they’d otherwise make playing the above game. It still makes sense (an engineering playground is anything but cheap) but good luck getting an employer to pay anything above “market rate”.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#58

Post by throwaway150 »

efilife wrote: post #20

This post shows some signs of having its parts written by a LLM in my opinion. Or am I crazy? Please tell me that I am. Author having this on his github makes me even more suspicious: https://github.com/ashishps1/learn-ai-engineering

> Or am I crazy?

You are not. The entire post is LLM slop. I am as baffled as you are how something like this could be on the front page of HN.

The senseless bolding of random words in the text, numbers that are way off and don't make any sense are the clues that the post is LLM generated and the blogger didn't even bother to proofread it.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#59

Post by philipallstar »

sumitkumar wrote: post #44
mbb70 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is often stated, microservices is a solution for scaling an engineering org to 100s of developers, not for scaling a product to millions of users.

Microservices is bad for teams without discipline to implement "separation of concerns". They hope that physical network boundaries will force the discipline they couldn't maintain in a single codebase. While microservices force physical separation, they don't stop "Spaghetti Architecture." Instead of messy code, you end up with "Distributed Spaghetti," where the dependencies are hidden in network calls and shared da…

> Observability: Tracking a single request across 10 services

I'm not sure if this is a discipline issue in the way that domain driven design, say, is a discipline issue. If you instrument requests with a global ID and point at tool at it then you're basically done from the individual team perspective.

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