We're on EC2, which has its set of limitations but means we can run a 10 million + user system with two-and-a-half engineers (and no ops team / overhead). So while we hear about more and more folks using SSDs in their DBs, it's not an option in our near-term future.
For SQL vs HBase/Haystack, we don't really have to worry about the photo storage itself, since S3 handles all of it. The data we shard out is more suited to an RDBMS, and since we're way more familiar with that world than with HBase and similar, it was the choice that let us make the most progress in a short time with a small team. Hope that's a helpful description of how we thought about it.
From what I am understanding from the post is that you are actually sharding other tables like photos, likes, comments but not the main users table, right?
So, if one day you want to shard the users table, it will render all current sharding useless, right?
We're on EC2, which has its set of limitations but means we can run a 10 million + user system with two-and-a-half engineers (and no ops team / overhead). So while we hear about more and more folks using SSDs in their DBs, it's not an option in our near-term future.
For SQL vs HBase/Haystack, we don't really have to worry about the photo storage itself, since S3 handles all of it. The data we shard out is more suited to an RDBMS, and since we're way more familiar with that world than with HBase and similar, it was the choice that let us make the most progress in a short time with a small team. Hope that's a helpful description of how we thought about it.