
On Moore's Law, Sharding and Device Driver Hell - dshah
http://yoavs.blogspot.com/2009/01/quick-thought-on-sharding.html
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russell
The article is a counterpoint to [http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1509-mr-
moore-gets-to-pun...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1509-mr-moore-gets-
to-punt-on-sharding), which argues that you dont need sharding because the
ever increasing capacity of servers comes to the rescue. Yoavs argues that
37signals is a special case and there are lots of scenarios where you need to
plan to scale beyond what bigger servers can give you. Examples are ratio of
database writes to reads is not low, beg iron is not cheap, special high
performance drives may be driver hell...

Both articles make good points. The real take-away is that you need to
understand the performance profile and growth modes of your application to
make a good decision on your scaling strategy. Or maybe you use AWS or
something similar to find out, before you commit to a hardware strategy.

