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by jwillmer
2806 days ago
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I hear this quite often but the case is that if you are looking for financing the main technical concern of the investors is how (and if) your application does scale - talking about SaaS. If a SaaS gets popular the new user load can be quite heavy and in the past there were a lot of story's about companies that needed to rebuild there system because of this (I think pipedrive was the last example I heard of).
Although it makes sense to ignore scaling at the beginning you need to design your application in a way that you can easily transition to something that can scale. |
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How often is this borne of ignorance, though?
> in the past there were a lot of story's about companies that needed to rebuild there system
More specifically, are investors merely remembering the struggles of the dot-com boom, when transistor density was one thousandth that of today?
Internet usage (number of users and number of services each one uses) has grown, too, but I haven't seen statistics that suggest this would be more than 100x of 20 years ago.
> Although it makes sense to ignore scaling at the beginning you need to design your application in a way that you can easily transition to something that can scale.
This presents a false dichotomy. One doesn't have to ignore scaling at the beginning to make the decision to trade initial time-to-market for eventual "horizontal" scalability (usually what is meant by "can scale" [1]), but that may be what happens in practice.
[1] even though one can buy a remarkably large single server 3-6x price premiums over mid-range single servers, as well as use other, more traditional techniques, before "needing" to rebuild the entire system.