Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers
The biggest thing we're going to regret looking back on the early Cloud era is the foolish notion that you need 100x as many servers to do 100x as much work.<p>Servers don't scale linearly. It's more likely you'll need, at a minimum, 107-110x as many servers. Between 100 + log(100) and 100 + sqrt(100).  So making your code 100x faster saves you more than 100 servers.<p>I think the arguments never end because it's all fuzzy math. Get too attached to running the whole thing on one server, and your architecture starts making irreversible decisions about where the source of truth is, and you get locked into a single server.<p>Give up too early, and you spend a lot of energy herding cattle instead of building features. And speed is something you outsource to the guys who write the checks. That's fine if you lock in your vertical, but I've worked on projects that lost out to a more responsive or financially efficient competitor. It really, really sucks.