Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Amazon Prime Video, a service that you’ve probably used and been annoyed by, published a blog post describing their journey in scaling up their audio-video monitoring service by 10x and reducing their costs by 90%. That’s, um, not usually how these things go.
They did this by using a combination of open source and commercial tools, and by optimizing their infrastructure. Annnnd by optimize their architecture, what I mean is they went back to what a lot of people think of as an outmoded design- one giant monolith. To be fair, it’s still a monolith in ECS, but after they did the math it turned out that the way they were using microservices just didn’t scale.
It’s a useful reminder that there’s nothing wrong with monolithic designs. You build a solution for the problem at hand. Then, as you scale or add features, you rethink what was there before. Just like monolithic designs aren’t never the solution, microservices aren’t always the solution.