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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

Vertical scaling maybe works forever for the 99% of companies that are CRUD apps running a basic website. As soon as you add any kind of 2D or 3D processing like image, video, etc. you pretty much have to have horizontal scaling at some point.

The sad truth is that your company probably won't be successful (statistically). You pretty never have to consider horizontal scaling until you have a few hundred thousand DAU.

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You don’t need to scale your application vertically even with media processing, you just need to distribute that chunk of the work, which is a lot easier (no state).

Like someone else said, distributing work across multiple machines is a form of horizontal scaling.

> Like someone else said, distributing work across multiple machines is a form of horizontal scaling.

Sure, but it is the easy kind, when it comes to images or videos. Lambda, for example, can handle a huge amount of image processing for pennies per month and there is none of the additional machine baggage that comes with traditional horizontal scaling.

It really depends. Handling streaming video service that does any kind of reprocessing of the data would probably be better off with horizontal scaling.

I imagine its still super simple to have one core app that handles most of the logic and then a job queue system that runs these high load jobs on worker machines.

Much simpler than having everything split.

Worker machines sound like horizontal scaling to me.

Sure but its a massive amount simpler than some massively distributed microservice app where every component runs on multiple servers.

Most of these vertical scaling examples given actually do use multiple servers but the core is one very powerful server.

Definitely. There is certainly a place for Horizontal scaling. Just wanted to highlight how underrated vertical scaling is and a good engineer would evaluate these scaling options with prudence and perspicacity, not cult behavior so often observed in software engineering circles.

I think somehow this is related to how business minded people think too. I went to a course where people learn to pitch their ideas to get funds but the basics of business simply did exist much among the technical people.

One simple example (which I suspect most of the business do) is that you do all work either manually yourself or on your laptop while advise them as a resource-rich service. Only when you truly can not handle the demand then you may 'scale up' and turn your business into 'real' business. And there are plenty of tricks like this (as legally as possible).

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