Facebook Cookbook

Build Now, Scale Later: Getting Real

Problem

I’ve heard so many horror stories about developers who didn’t think through their scaling issues at the beginning and ended up with 250,000 users and were madly running around trying to scale their app. I don’t want to do that! I want to build in scaling right from the start. Isn’t that a smarter approach?

Solution

Go watch this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ntfEKmIg_VQ.

(If that video isn’t available, close your eyes and picture the iLike team madly driving around the Bay Area in a rental truck, begging, borrowing, and buying 150 rack-mounted servers and installing them in their data center, all in 48 hours.)

At the time when the iLike crew went on their mad dash, they already had six million users. The moral of this story is that you can always scale by throwing more money at servers later. It is important for you to take some time to think about scalability now, but if you plan to build out a carefully load-balanced, n-tier architecture for your zero users, you’re going to spend the next six months figuring out how to do that while someone else just does it (to quote Nike) and has a six-month head start.

Discussion

Here’s a fun exercise to get you into the right headspace. Start by drawing a line across this page, which would be defacing this book if I didn’t do it for you (Figure 4-3).

Figure 4-3. A plain old line

Now take that plain old ...