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Not Just Scale
It seems like everywhere I look on the internet these days, somebody’s making some form of the following argument: You don’t need distributed systems! Computers are so fast these days you can serve all your customers off a single machine! This argument is silly and reductive. But first, let’s look for the kernel of truth.
This argument is based on a kernel of truth: modern machines are extremely powerful, can do vast amounts of work every second, and can fit all the data belonging to even some rather large businesses in memory. A great example is from the MemoryDB paper where we saw how composition of specialized components allowed the overall system to both significantly reduce memory demand and bring down tail latency. It is common to see reductive views of simplicity that consider only part of a system’s responsibilities, dismissing important requirements or ignoring the way they’re actually achieved.
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