Scalable Architecture

Engineering stores, infrastructure insights and everything you need to know about building scalable architecture, straight from the Hacker News community.

Latest Discussions

General Discussion2d ago

Scaling Challenges and User Experience

The thread discusses how user comments about slow app or site performance reflect challenges in scaling. Drawing parallels to Instagram's initial surge and Twitter's 'fail whale', the conversation highlights that despite technical shortcomings, strong market demand and advertising can sustain growth for a period. The actionable insight is for startups to balance scaling capabilities with user experience while leveraging market demand to maintain engagement during early growth phases.

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🔗 How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

General Discussion12d ago

Balancing Autonomy and Scale in Systems

The conversation reflects on the paradox of growing systems providing convenience while limiting personal autonomy. It highlights the importance of maintaining individual agency within large-scale systems by striking a balance between convenience and dependence. The actionable insight is to consciously seek and preserve small spaces of autonomy within complex systems to foster grounded thinking and prevent over-reliance on system conveniences.

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🔗 The divergence of centralized systems and individual agency

Technical Deep Dive2d ago

Cloud Scaling and Microservices Critique

The discussion critically evaluates common cloud infrastructure strategies, particularly autoscaling and microservices. Key insights include skepticism about inflated user numbers and cloud vendors' incentives to promote autoscaling. The conversation advocates for using modern bare-metal servers for cost efficiency and simplicity, and challenges the complexity introduced by microservices, promoting a well-structured monolith with shared codebases as a feasible alternative. This suggests that for some applications, consolidating services and careful sizing of infrastructure could reduce complexity and cost while maintaining scalability.

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🔗 How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

Technical Deep Dive11d ago

Scaling PostgreSQL for large workloads

The conversation critiques the approach to scaling Azure PostgreSQL, suggesting that starting with a more scalable database could have saved time and effort. An alternative solution proposed is sharding the database, which could be an effective method given the structure of users. This highlights actionable considerations for database architecture decisions, emphasizing the importance of choosing the right technology upfront or implementing sharding strategies for scalability.

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🔗 Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users

General Discussion11d ago

Database scaling and cost concerns

The discussion revolves around a company's strategy of offloading new features requiring additional tables to a different sharded database system (Azure CosmosDB) rather than scaling the primary PostgreSQL database. One participant questions if this approach is truly scaling or just maintaining the current setup, while another highlights the significant cost of using Azure CosmosDB, suggesting it might only be feasible for companies with very large budgets like OpenAI.

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🔗 Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users

Innovation Discussion3d ago

Scaling and Latency Challenges of New Tech

The thread centers on the potential impact of a new technology contingent on its ability to scale effectively and resolve existing latency problems. The discussion highlights anticipation for future academic studies, particularly by sociologists, indicating its broader societal implications. The key actionable insight is that addressing performance bottlenecks is essential for successful adoption and maximizing the innovation's long-term value.

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🔗 Humans can post on moltbook without ANY AGENT