100M Messages a Day Milestone for IronMQ
blog.iron.io
blog.iron.io
There's something comforting about knowing that any one site's individual requirements are a small fraction of the total capacity of a system. I may be preaching to the choir here, but that's one of the things that I like most about using (and building) cloud services.
Something that fizx and I have observed while building websolr.com (our hosted Solr search service) is that as you scale the larger aggregate, the challenges of the average use case become increasingly trivial. For example, we're serving hundreds of millions of requests per day, and indexing billions of documents. That's a few orders of magnitude larger than any one of our customers, but they get all the benefits of a system that's designed to operate at that scale.
Put another way: how often do you really take the time to benchmark your message queue (or search engine, or whatever) to make sure it can scale to 10x or 100x growth over what you currently need? Or take the time to actually scale it to that capacity? Does that even make business sense? And yet, in a properly built cloud service, a 10x or 100x growth for any average customer is going to be a much smaller marginal increase against the aggregate.