Ops and Scalability stuff

Hi again,

It's been long time since I have written anything on this blog. Lots have been going on in outbrain, mostly amazing stuff!!! Twitter have been filling lots of my sharing needs and put the blog aside for a while. So does our podcast which became successful and we keep for 18 months already.

However, from time to time the writing drives come up.

During the last year or so, I'm leading the operations team in outbrain, this role, especially in company that grows the business as fast as outbrain, has a great deal of scalability challenges which are fascinating to handle.  I will try to share with you some of it in the next few posts.

This time I want to share with you a site I recently bumped into (thanks Nathan).

http://scale.metaoptimize.com/ is a kind of a "stackoverflow" kinda site that is dealing only on Scalability/NoSQL/High Availability/all * computing/etc...

I want to share here an answer I gave there to this question:

Design for n+1 scaling upfront or not?

hey,

That's the big question and the short answer is "don't need to give a damn about scalable design".

The longer answer is: During product life cycle, especially in a new venture, you are zigzaging a lot. The product idea that you have today is probably very far from what it will end up to be. Why is that? because when you start a Start-up you are so damn dumb about what your users want. you just have a vague idea that make sense to some friends and investors. The real wisdom start flowing into the product only after few iterations where you were failing to get the product to "catch" user base. and as you know, product without user base doesn't need any scalability.

So having that there is no other way than making enough mistakes to get to one viable product, all you need to develop is the method to get a lean product out FAST. For that - scalability is the lowest priority task for you. As CTO of start-up that had to face (and still facing) scalability Challenges I can only tip you with one thing. Once you have an idea that this is going to be big, make sure you have the personnel that is capable in building and designing a scalable system.

Start-up is a roller-coaster - enjoy the ride!

Comments

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