If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this.
Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actual underlings.
Additional load reveals limits and breaklines that were never known before - your temporary integer IDs are suddenly too small, you reach the maximum file descriptors in a Linux distro, your hash function suddenly has repeating conflicts, your DB index is suddenly oversaturated.
Having massive exponential growth of your traffic would probably require constant refactoring to meet the ever changing system limits.
It's hard to design something (large and complex) for much more than 10X scale with only HW capacity increases.
100% agree.
> Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience.
Not my overall experience 30 years in the industry.
> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
You'll always be asked to do more with less, at least, that's my own experience.
Amazing you can say this with a straight face in these DC building times.
Have you tried getting Azure east instances anytime lately?
Hey man, in case you hadn't heard, the hardware industry is having a lot of trouble keeping up. "Expand our capacity" isn't as easy as it was 2 years ago.
Now however, it's competing for resources directly with the corporations core strategic plans.
GitHub having issues is embarrassing, but the shareholders don't really care.
So even if these cloud/SAAS solutions perform poorly it is not like customers have wherewithal to create alternate solutions.
it's not impossible. they don't, right up until they do
Something about these two factors seems to have conspired to wreak absolute havoc on their uptime in the ~7yr hence. The AI slopocalypse hasn't helped matters, but the foundations were laid far earlier.
Would love to hear from an insider, either for or against this conspiracy theory.