Intuitively Showing How To Scale a Web Application Using a Coffee Shop as an Example

This is a guest repost by Sriram Devadas, Engineer at Vistaprint, Web platform group. A fun and well written analogy of how to scale web applications using a familiar coffee shop as an example. No coffee was harmed during the making of this post.

I own a small coffee shop.

My expense is proportional to resources
100 square feet of built up area with utilities, 1 barista, 1 cup coffee maker.

My shop's capacity
Serves 1 customer at a time, takes 3 minutes to brew a cup of coffee, a total of 5 minutes to serve a customer.

Since my barista works without breaks and the German made coffee maker never breaks down,
my shop's maximum throughput = 12 customers per hour.

Web server

Customers walk away during peak hours. We only serve one customer at a time. There is no space to wait.

I upgrade shop. My new setup is better!

Expenses
Same area and utilities, 3 baristas, 2 cup coffee maker, 2 chairs

Capacity
3 minutes to brew 2 cups of coffee, ~7 minutes to serve 3 concurrent customers, 2 additional customers can wait in queue on chairs.

Concurrent customers = 3, Customer capacity = 5

Scaling vertically

Business is booming. Time to upgrade again. Bigger is better!...

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Douglas Adams - 3 Rules that Describe Our Reactions to Technologies

Chris Dixon unearthed a great quote from Douglas Adams on the nature of technological adoption that unsurprisingly hits the mark in our ever changing and evolving world:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things

Some that come to mind: horse to car, index card to online search, PC to mobile, web to app, portal to messaging, Newton to Einstein, oil to electric, rock to rap, Aquinas to Bacon, buying to renting, files to streaming, network TV to cordkilling, broadcast to social, programming CPUs to programming biology, server to cloud, vm to container, wired to wireless, long read to TLDR, privacy to public to ephemeral, paper based news aggregation to digital aggregation, checks to online banking, gold to fiat to bitcoin, linear to exponential growth, large to small teams, to a world that ignores you to a world the responds to you, nation states to who knows what, a military of people to a Military of Things, and weekly versus binge watching. Any others?

21 Quality Screencasts on Scaling Rails

This a follow-up post to an earlier post on the Scaling Rails Screencast Series by Gregg Pollack, when there were only 13 screencasts, now there are 21. Eight more have been added on topics like load testing and database scaling. This series is of surprisingly high quality. While I didn't view every screencast, I sampled a large set and found them to have solid content and high production values. In fact, how did they make these things? The instructor moves around in a little box while the content flows around him. A very cool effect. But that wouldn't matter if the content didn't deliver, here's what's new:

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