Hacker News Reader

Question for HN: what is your estimate on the minimum man/womanpower needed to scale a product/service up to 10K users? 1M? 900M? For instance, what fraction of Facebook's work is related to making things scale? How much effort does a smaller company like Quora put into scaling for users? I imagine PaaS/IaaS services like Google App Engine and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk help a lot but I'm curious as to what you think.

View on HN

Depends on the product!

Are you making something that searches the entire internet for relevant documents based on a custom query? Or are you sending a picture to another phone that goes away in < 5s? Or is this a blog?

If you're talking "minimum" then theoretically it could be 1 person. It's very easy to scale static pages. Heck - you could host a static page on S3.

Sure, but what's the most popular application hosted on AWS? Does it approach 900 million users?

It was probably Instagram before they moved to FB datacenters, with around 150-200 million monthly users ...

http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/89992572022/mig...

Maybe Reddit now then? 200 million monthly uniques:

https://www.reddit.com/about/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com