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by okamiueru 1453 days ago
Any startup that knows what their product is and are done with PoCs, should be able to deal with the consequence of succeeding, without failing. Scaling is one of those things that should be in place before you need it. In our case, scaling was a main concern.
2 comments
mgkimsal 1453 days ago
> In our case, scaling was a main concern.

and ... you might be justified in that concern. However... after having been in the web space for 25+ years, it's surprising to me how many people have this as a primary concern ("we gotta scale!") while simultaneously never coming close to having this concern be justified.

I'm not saying it should be an either/or situation, but... I've lost count of how many "can it scale?" discussions I've had where "is it tested?" and "does it work?" almost never cross anyone's lips. One might say "it's assumed it's tested" or "that's a baseline requirement" but there's rarely verification of the tests, nor any effort put in to maintaining the tests as the system evolves.

EDIT: so... when I hear/read "scaling is a main concern" my spidey-sense tingles a bit. It may not be wrong, but it's often not the right questions to be focused on during many of the conversations I have.

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jjav 1453 days ago
> I'm not saying it should be an either/or situation, but... I've lost count of how many "can it scale?" discussions I've had where "is it tested?" and "does it work?" almost never cross anyone's lips.

Also, discussions about rewrites to scale up service capacity, but nobody has actually load tested the current solution to know what it can do.

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nprateem 1453 days ago
Just keep it simple, and if you take off scale vertically while you then work on a scalable solution. Since most businesses fail, premature optimisation just means you're wasting time that could have gone on adding more features or performing more tests.

It's a trap many of us fall into - I've done it myself. But next time I'll chuck money at the problem, using whatever services I can buy to get to market as fast as possible to test the idea. Only when it's proven will I go back and rebuild a better product. I'll either run a monolith or 1-2 services on VPSs, or something like Google cloud run or the AWS equivalent.

Scaling something no one wants is pointless.

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