Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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To elaborate, I’m using managed databases that abstract away scaling so that my UX as a developer is that they are scaling horizontally (in data, and cost).

While I’m pre-launch and doing testing, using a more traditional vertical model is money out of my pocket. And it’s not something I want to maintain after I launch either.

Also, I’m creating something (a freemium game) where as a solo dev it will only be worth it for me to continue working on the business if it sees explosive growth. If I’m lucky enough for that to materialize, there will be at least a few months before I can hire fulltime help for the product (while also being busy doing tons of other stuff) - it would be terrible to have to handle tons of db operations tasks or re-architect things to support growth during that time.

Basically, vertical scaling is optimizing for the wrong level of usage. It’s actually the same for many of the snarky “your startup doesn’t need horizontal scaling” comments here - if your states are {building, huge growth, failure} then horizontal scaling is perfect because it keeps your costs low while you’re building and handles the huge growth phase more gracefully. Yes, maybe you’ll never get to the huge growth phase, but the entire business is oriented around either getting there or failing.

I certainly didn't mean my comment to be snarky. However, I do want to be realistic. There's an exception for every guideline. Maybe yours is that exception. I worked at a company like you described, where we had a few tens of thousands of users, but were actively in talks with a partner that would have given us international press, and who would have taken us to about 20 million concurrent users a month later. (Imagine a beer company telling their customers to use our app to interact with the Super Bowl broadcast. That sort of thing.) We spent a lot of time talking about horizontal scaling because that was the whole point of the company. Maybe yours is like that, too.

But the vast majority of small companies are not like that. They acquire one customer, then another, and another, and grow N<=50% per year, with tons of headroom on default app configurations. For those companies, worrying about explosive, global scaling instead of, you know, building their business, is time they can't get back.

I worked for a company. The system was basically a crud web app, where users could upload medical imaging data, and send it to be processed in the background.

We had the web app set up on Kubernetes, yet the background jobs had to be manually managed by admins at the company. There were less than 300 users in total and the only time Kubernetes scaled beyond one pod was when something was broken. When I joined, they had just implemented the Kubernetes stuff. I thought it was kind of overkill, but as the new guy I didn't feel it was my place to point it out. Buy hey, some people got some nice experience on their resumes.

I know this well. I've also head to argue for 'even if we become a monopolist is our market, the current service without scaling will keep up (we can literally get a reasonable guess of the total number of potential users), why are you implementing holizontal scaling?'

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