"Pinterest has learned about scaling the way most popular sites do — the architecture works until one day it doesn’t"Pinterest found out that "the architecture" is not scalable and they turned to development of a Scale Out mechanism also called Sharding.
I find it amazing that sharding, or in other words, the idea of "scale out by splitting and parallelizing data across shared-nothing commodity-hardware" is not supplied "out of the box" by "the architecture" (such as database, load-balancer, any other IT stuff). I'm wondering who was the one that decided that an IT issue like scale-out should be outsourced from the database to the application developers?...
But to scale the database? To enjoy the obvious advantages of "scale out by splitting and parallelizing data across shared-nothing commodity-hardware"? - for this the world still thinks developers need to stop investing effort in innovation, better product, competitive business. Instead they need harness their how-databases-really-work skills to write band-aid code to scale the DB.
Amazing... As you know I took it personally, and have been solving this paradox every day now, by bringing a complete, automatic, out-of-the-box "scale-out
machine", that we like to call ScaleBase. I think Pinterest story is great, with a great outcome,
but it's not always the case with this complex matter, and a generic,
repeatable, IT-level solution for Scale Out can make it much easier for all
other "Pinterests" out there to be as successful and make the right choice and enjoy the
great benefits - without the tremendous efforts and labor in home-grown sharding.
