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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

i keep seeing "but this is only relevant if you are working at FAANG scale" but most productive applications work at similar scale. there's little fun or education just speaking about mocks or prototypes.

sure there are a lot of startups that start off and don't have much traffic. but i don't like that we dismiss real world _productive_ applications because not many companies hit that scale. but most productive applications hit that scale!!

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> most productive applications work at similar scale

What do you mean by "productive" here? The overwhelming majority (probably >99%) of billed/salaried software development hours are not spent working on FAANG-scale software. Does none of that count as "productive"?

Yes but the vast majority of applications that make money doing productive things have scale and complexity high enough that a monolith with sql won’t cut it.

I think you're underestimating the huge variety of productive apps in existence. For every system that handles >1M requests per second, there are probably at least 10 systems that won't even see 1M requests per hour. For example: Twice I've worked on apps for configuring motor control centers. I think you would consider these "productive" apps, but even if we had 100% market share there just aren't that many people in the world who need to configure a motor control center on any given day. The world is full of such apps.

People using and suggesting service oriented architecture are concerned with not just scale in terms of rps but also complexity in terms of lines of code and how much the code changed.

The number of apps that are also productive, also low rps, also not that complex, also not dynamic are few in number.

I guess this website is such an example.

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