Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

Re:Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastruc... by tabeth on Friday February 03, 2017 @01:17AM (#13558115)

What's the back-end equivalent of "free scaling?" For example, with the front-end, if you have a SPA or a website that's completely static, you can serve static files and JavaScript in a way that scales horizontally for free.

Is there a back-end designed (with compromises and all) in a way where scaling horizontally is free, at the expense of compute power or some other sacrifice? I want to say Erlang/Elixir, but I haven't played around with it enough to say for sure.

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Re:Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastruc... by luckystartup on Friday February 03, 2017 @05:10AM (#13558859)

Most server backends can easily scale horizontally, including Ruby on Rails, Node.js, and Elixir. The only requirement is that you don't keep any "state" in your server code. A novice programmer can make this mistake in any language, including Elixir.

Read about the "Twelve-Factor App": https://12factor.net/

The main bottleneck is usually your database, which can be tricky to scale. You set up things like read slaves and sharding.

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Re:Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastruc... by toong on Friday February 03, 2017 @01:26AM (#13558158)

Stateless applications are a big part of the answer. "Serverless" (like AWS Lambda) is an extreme impl of stateless that gets "free scaling".

You will need to keep state somewhere and AWS has some pretty decent solutions for that.

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