Ask HN: How would you scale Apple's web store?

3 points·davidcann··4 comments

Apple's web store goes down after every announcement. Clearly, they have a huge amount of traffic, but shouldn't it be possible to handle that kind of traffic spike?

I don't have much experience on that scale, so I'd like to hear from some experts about how it could be done.

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I'm not sure if you are talking about the right thing. They take the store down to update the products (so they don't leak a product and not a spike in traffic)

In terms of scale, maybe it's just not on their list of immediate concerns.

If you people are buying your product such that you sell-out and get flak for running out so quickly, you would focus not on making your point-of-sale more efficient. In fact, it might even not be worth the extra millions that it'd cost for scaling on the one day of an announcements.

How would you? Use the power of a distributed CDN and cache everything.

I'd say it's more of a marketing move than a scale issue.

At this point it's like a government service.

Why should they care if you have to wait in line for two hours at the DMV? Where else are you going to go?

Apple has a product they sell for $500 to $900, their website collapses every new release, and they still have to limit people to "Two per customer."

Sort of, government services are usually impossible to survive without. Apple however, can still miss out on sales by having a downed website.

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