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Comment by spacehunt | Hacker News Reader

> it's well known that a rep from AWS was also throwing jabs at them during launch for their issues

That's pretty low. FWIW Simcity 2013 is on AWS and the launch was far more disastrous. Doesn't prove anything.

Programming architecture/problems in SC, yes.

I think Pokemon scaled remarkably better than any app many of us have ever dealt with, seeing the crazy demand spikes. You would run into a lot of app issues, data choices, a lot of things that don't just get solved from simple uses of autoscaling.

It scaled better than Twitter, it hit the same active user count (or close to it) in a month that took Twitter years to reach, and Twitter would sh*t the bed all the time with the infamous "fail whale" popping up for users constantly even with its steady increase in growth over time and time to adapt. Twitter was pioneering at reaching that scale, that many now use as guide/lessons learned now, so its forgiven, but how many companies see that much growth, that fast?

To be fair -- Twitter is a much harder architectural problem (significant fan-out and fan-in problems to solve).

Pokemon Go is less complicated in terms of the conceptual model. There are only a few pretty simple ways that different players can interact (gyms, lures on pokestops, that's about it).

On the other hand, Twitter is dealing with strings < 140 character. Pokemon Go is tracking all the trainers and Pokemon at all times, not to mention the gyms and lures.

Sure, but you can partition based on country, city and even block, it's clear how this should work.

None of Twitter can be partitioned like that because every user follows different people.

Of course this makes you wonder if this is at all necessary and the right design decision.

And for just a little extra context, Twitter launched the same year as AWS.

Thank you for remembering this. Also worth pointing out that they too ruined their launch experience for millions because of features no one really wanted that were secondary to the core experience ;) (IIRC they did some sort of light simulation offloading and social / competition features in "the cloud" which made the entire game not function without an internet connection.)

Reminds me of this exchange: https://twitter.com/kobunheat/status/745332230256459776

Yeah, people should never be able to make friendly jokes about competitors.

The comment was pretty clearly not saying that, at all.

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