[msbarnett]

In a production environment, at scale, this is a relatively uncomplex example, I think. At any rate I've seen significantly more complicated multi-service architectures for what would also have been called a "front-end" business.

[ptn]

Now, that scrambled my brains. Uncomplex? I thought this was pretty complicated and that mojombo was a scalability God (and he may be).

Could you point me to more complex examples?

[nostrademons]

This is why it's helpful to work in a big, successful company before founding your startup. You get a sense of the scale and complexity of problems that actually have real users, and practice dealing with those problems. If you stay long enough, you also get a sense of the trade-offs involved, and which complexities are accidental vs. which are inherent.

Of course, when you actually go to found the company, you should forget all that scalability nonsense and start with the simplest system possible. However, it's worth having an image in your head about how the system will evolve and what the appropriate response to various scalability challenges is.

[msbarnett]

Uncomplex is probably the wrong word. Averagely complex for this sort of thing? Not easy to achieve or trivial to build, but, from a 40,000 foot perspective, probably typical of the kinds of complexity you'd find in most popular web applications.

There's a very long discussion, somewhere, of Amazon's eventually-consistent architecture that I'd say is definitely on the high-complexity side of things. Unfortunately I can't find the link I'm thinking of, at the moment.