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Cloud computing resources are nearly limitless.

Provision the resources and take the financial hit in costs.

If your architecture wasn't able to scale horizontally because it was poorly designed, heads should roll. This isn't some social network - these are financial platforms where literally the individual customer is financially dependent.

Heads. Should. Roll. Tell us the post-mortems, and then tell us who got the boot. Completely unacceptable.




The only company in the world who can claim to have made a perfectly horizontal system at all levels of macro and micro is amazon, and even they would be lying to do so.

A system like robinhood can have hundreds of moving parts, if 99 of them are horizontally scalable but 1 is not, eventually that 1 piece will become the bottle neck, and the fact it hadn't been made horizontally scalable yet is more likely to be a testament to how much work would have to go into doing so.

> Heads. Should. Roll. Tell us the post-mortems, and then tell us who got the boot. Completely unacceptable.

This is an unfortunate viewpoint. How quickly did we forget that robinhood is literally providing a service that no other company was able to do before. You want 100% uptime, you won't find it in an online service, let alone an online fee free service, you'll find it on the floor of the exchange.


All brokers were able to do it, they just didn't because commissions were easy profit and there was no competition.

$0 commissions aren't a big deal either. If you just buy and hold, it makes no difference. If you trade actively then a real broker with better tech and order management is worth way more than the fees.


> The only company in the world who can claim to have made a perfectly horizontal system at all levels of macro and micro is amazon, and even they would be lying to do so.

Haha, true. Call up you AWS account representative and you may find that certain service limits can’t be increased for love or money.


> a service that no other company was ~~able~~ willing to do before

ftfy


If you’re limited by database throughput and can’t scale further, throwing more hardware into the mix doesn’t help.


If you horizontally scale all the way, you just take on different issues like CAP theorem trade-offs. Financial book-keeping is a hard thing to scale and all it takes is a single component that cannot, like the transactional bedrock of your system.


Just use Google Spanner


I don't think getting rid of the people who know the system best will help anything. Some new guy who comes in with no clue of what happened or any of the codebase is not going to do a better job. It's just going to reduce long term productivity and increase risk.




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