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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

There's also old fashioned performance improvements. Most enterprise software has plenty of room for improvement there. I've noticed a correlation between people that push for distributed systems and ones that don't know how things like indexes and transactions work or the need to avoid n+1 queries.

I'm sure some apps need to be distributed systems, but I bet it's a tiny minority.

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Given that HN runs on a single server [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006 ], I'd be very willing to take your side of the bet.

Yes, that's exactly my point. This article makes it sound like you need a distributed system at almost any level of scale. Yet the reality is, you only need one of you are doing tons of writes. Most systems are read-heavy, which is why most people scale reads horizontally instead of using a distributed system.

More or less agree with your point, just wanted to point out that scaling reads horizontally usually means adding a distributed quality to your system, and not understanding how that impacts the system can have bad side effects

Where do you draw the line of where a horizontally scalable system begins? Scaling reads might only involve a caching server, but most of us probably wouldn't consider an app server with a cache to be distributed.

there's also availability, especially for enterprises. so redundant frontend and master/slave db at least. may or may be not distributed, according to one's personal definition of distributed.

People who actually know how to build distributed systems would understand transactions and indexes.

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