Monthly Update call
Me : I need 2 undivided weeks in the next 3 months to make some refactoring to our codebase, so we dont have issues in scaling.

Senior Manager (with years of tech experience almost equal to my age) :
Why would we need that, We are already hosted on AWS so we can just spin up more instances.

Me ( trying to hold the rage inside) : No it doesnt work that way, that will only hurt us more than help.

Him : What if we try with a bigger instance size. Its AWS, sure they will have a bigger instance.

Me : No, tha....
Him : (cuts me off) How about we use autoscaling and let AWS decide

Me : (Silently praying for a gun that shots across video calls.)

I’ve had this many times, never ends well.

You really need to take a piss but it takes too long? Just install more toilets or maybe a bigger one

Fight fire with fire:
Sure! that will cost us! I think it might be very costly. Do you have cost estimates? no? ok - Then we should prepare some cost/benefit analysis documents! Btw, my refactor task will reduce operating costs, not increase them - can you make sure that goes into the documents?

@magicMirror I dont think they care about costs at all, even with the current infra, we are easily paying 40-60% more than we should.

@coldfire DAFUQ?
Time to mine monero, while they pay for it....

Can you enlighten me why this won't work?, It's very cost inefficient but it should work no?

You can have a baby born in three months if you get three women to work on it instead of just one!

@Crost

Scaling horizontally - more machines
Scaling vertically - more resource for a machine

Scaling horizontally is like ... Putting a knot at the end of a water hose and putting holes in the water hose.

More holes - more water pours out.

But... If the pressure reaches a critical point, the whole water hose just blows up.

As an real example:

In networking, scaling horizontally usually requires that the loadbalancer can distribute the work.

Too many nodes and the loadbalancer will be overwhelmed by incoming connections - worst case going down under traffic, meaning none of the workers get any request.

Other example: More nodes, but nodes take too long for requests.

Yes you could add more nodes - but as the requests take too long, you're having a larger and larger mass of unfinished requests stuck in processing. Either the loadbalancer gives up at some point or you can't add more nodes / add nodes fast enough.

Spreading work across several nodes as a band aid is never a good solution.

The whole organism of loadbalancer and services needs to be balanced out or you'll end up with a doomsday machine