"To characterize that scale as common is one of the most embarrassing failures of modern software engineering."
This point cannot be stressed enough. Almost all the worst software engineering failures I have seen have been caused by premature scaling - which is way worse than premature optimization because the latter's effects are usually local. But premature scaling causes architectural decisions that affects the whole project and simple cannot be undone.
One example among many are some of the influential engineers insisting on that we needed four application servers with fail-over because they had experienced servers crashing under heavy load. This complicated failover setup took huge amount of time and resources to setup, delaying the project by months. In the end it only attracted a few hundred visitors per day and was cancelled in under a year.
This complicated failover setup took huge amount of time and resources to setup, delaying the project by months.
Hmm - failover shouldn't be that hard to set up. If it was then that suggests that other issues (technical debt, inexperienced management) were the more likely culprits.
Not the simple fact that they chose not to ignore the need for failover.
This point cannot be stressed enough. Almost all the worst software engineering failures I have seen have been caused by premature scaling - which is way worse than premature optimization because the latter's effects are usually local. But premature scaling causes architectural decisions that affects the whole project and simple cannot be undone.
One example among many are some of the influential engineers insisting on that we needed four application servers with fail-over because they had experienced servers crashing under heavy load. This complicated failover setup took huge amount of time and resources to setup, delaying the project by months. In the end it only attracted a few hundred visitors per day and was cancelled in under a year.