Scaling and the Friction of Dimension

If you’ve been in software development for a while, you know that small web applications are ill-suited for massive load. I’m writing this a few days after Black Friday in the US. This year, another large retailer had a site outage, losing tens of millions of dollars in expected sales. The retailer definitely didn’t have a small system, but it is easy to imagine that if their possible load had been much smaller, the system could have been simpler and everything would have gone ok.

Over the...