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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s the architecture or technology the commenter is reacting to, it’s this line: “You should never need to directly access any data that is stored in there.”

Statements like that are a huge red flag that the designers of the product are not particularly experienced with operating this type of system at meaningful scale.

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Eh, the technology stack they discuss is directly accessible, though.

I read this as an advertisement, meaning if everything it working well you don't need to manage the database. Which is probably how it works 99% of the time in fairness.

The circumstances are immaterial; if the creators of a system are blasé enough to imagine you’ll neither need nor want to manage or query the underlying data storage, then they’re telegraphing naiveté and inexperience. Capacity, throughput, latency, consistency concerns exist in any nontrivial system and the pointy end/bottleneck of these is very often at the level of persistence. Auth services can add privacy and integrity to that pile. And so on. Consequently, glossing over it with a handwave is a bright red flag.

To me this statement read very differently. I read it as saying that the amount of state is small and portable enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about scalability issues or be married to a particular database product. I think the original complaint about it is overly critical and nit picking.

yes this was the intent

99% of the time is a rather high rate of failure .. 1% of a year is still over 3 days. 1% of a million is still a lot of incidents

Sure but you are allowed to put the 99% front and center in marketing.

A good chunk of the other 1% are square-peg-in-round-home situations.

It is good to support all the various edge cases but it is also on 6 to focus on the happy path

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