[taude]

Is S.O. a good example of a complicated/large distributed system? I couldn't find any quick googleable results on how many people work on their site.

The reason I ask is I'm working on a product with 30-ish different pods/teams (maybe about 200 - 250 engineers) working on their respective modules, microservices, etc. From my understanding with talking to a lot of others at conferences, is that our distributed system is fairly small (in terms of functional modules/teams, transactions, etc..).

Anyway, even at our small-ish scale, I couldn't imaging running our platform as a single app that were were able to scale up with better hardware.

Also, I think how a company supports multi-tenanting would play a big role in deciding how this works, too, because you can have scenario with a monolith and DB but you have it partitioned by individual tenant dbs, app servers, etc, and you still have a huge pile of hardware (real or virtual) you're dancing around in....

[collyw]

My point is that Stack Overflow seems to have kept things as simple as possible, the opposite of a "complicated distributed system". It seems to be a classical relational databases backed app with some additions for specific parts where it needed to scale. In the end I guess it is distributed but it looks like its based largely around a monolith.

https://stackexchange.com/performance

[iateanapple]

> Anyway, even at our small-ish scale, I couldn't imaging running our platform as a single app that were were able to scale up with better hardware.

Lots of 250+ engineer teams out there working on monoliths.

[lostcolony]

Distributed systems (and specifically microservices) are oftentimes solutions to organizational problems, not technical ones.