[themartorana]

I can't think of a single billion dollar Corp that can run Rails on a few AWS boxes. Time and again companies have rewritten systems from MVP to handle data safer, better, and faster, from Dropbox to Twitch to CloudFlare to Uber to Mail.ru...

Then there are plenty of 7 figure companies that have also had scale issues. Game companies come to mind first and foremost but they're hardly the only ones.

You want to run your marketing website on Rails? Yeah of course. But billion dollar companies on Rails?

[ceslami]

For the sake of discovering a middle ground between our arguments, let's look at an example of a >$1B company running Rails: Github.

Most of Github's stack is Ruby on Rails, with specialized components/sub-systems written in C. This is a common theme amongst companies that use Rails or Python at scale.

There's a reason why people keep those languages around. Its the same reason why they tend to be used for MVPs: the tool gets out of your way so you can focus on solving the hard problems of your domain. The longer you can preserve those ergonomics, the better.

[vacri]

My guess is that Github uses a few more cpus than "a fistful of c4.larges" suggests.

[patkai]

I wonder about the valuation of Basecamp, they may almost qualify.