On the internet, success is most likely to cause failure.
That’s a paradox that can take entrepreneurs by surprise. Maybe it’s true about everything? The internet simply makes it happen faster. A web server that was happily serving 100 people today, probably isn’t going to happily serve 100,000 tomorrow. At the very moment the world has finally discovered your solution to life-the-universe-and-everything, that solution dies in a heap of technical errors, and the world goes away again, suitably unimpressed.
This article describes my personal experiences of scaling a website up to serve tens of thousands users each day, most recently by hosting Gnomish literature in a “Cloud” environment. Continue reading “Taking El to the Clouds”
