Infrastructure Scaling Strategies

This cluster discusses strategies for scaling web applications and infrastructure to handle sudden traffic spikes, such as those from Hacker News frontpage features, including autoscaling, vertical/horizontal scaling, cloud services like AWS, and challenges with databases and costs.

📉 Falling 0.4x DevOps & Infrastructure
3,488
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#3281
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
8
2008
33
2009
69
2010
105
2011
106
2012
122
2013
180
2014
132
2015
143
2016
194
2017
199
2018
219
2019
227
2020
336
2021
259
2022
311
2023
296
2024
293
2025
249
2026
7

Keywords

e.g PHP CPU DO S3 youtu.be AWS manning.com e.x RapGenius scaling scale nodes heroku load cluster auto handle traffic servers

Sample Comments

It does not do automatic scaling, but, if you're expecting a one time spike you can just go with a huge server for that hour.

mkrishnan Nov 24, 2020 View on HN

What? looks like you don't really understand the power of aws/serverless/Kubernetes/kafka/cassandra/graphql/react. when your app becomes instant hit after featuring in the frontpage of HN, you will have 1 billion daily active users and your business goes into flames because of new workload.

ceejayoz Sep 8, 2023 View on HN

Bandwidth would be the concern, I think. They won't auto-scale machines up/down for you.

toomuchtodo Aug 8, 2018 View on HN

Sounds more expensive than scaling up more servers on demand.

qaq Sep 10, 2016 View on HN

This is "not that different" from getting a very high load spike do you guys not have some autoscaling setup?

kridsdale3 Jan 8, 2025 View on HN

There was a capacity crunch on the AWS nodes they rely on. I expect them to have a quality dial to pull back before overload. It would scale based on usage and server availablity.

jm3 Jun 22, 2010 View on HN

Does your number of instances scale up and down frequently, or does it monotonically increase with growth?

simonw Dec 7, 2022 View on HN

At what point would you expect to need to scale out?

2Gkashmiri Jan 16, 2025 View on HN

how..... does a web application scale infra to these mind boggling numbers instantly?

ucflibrary Apr 2, 2013 View on HN

Using AWS or similar, you can upgrade to a huge server for just a few hours, then downgrade it once the traffic tapers.