Prioritize Business Value Over Premature Scaling in System Design

Key Quotes

"I feel like it's challenging bridging the gap between theory and practice for that aspect 100 and I was thinking about this topic earlier today right I was just reading a post on X that went viral where a startup was talking about their migration to Kubernetes and that it almost cost them their startup."

Bassem highlights the common challenge of applying theoretical system design knowledge in real-world scenarios, noting how a startup's migration to Kubernetes, driven by non-technical pressures, nearly led to failure. This illustrates that practical implementation and business context are often more critical than theoretical adherence.

"At GitHub for example, I built services that handle millions of requests per second that are just simply running on a five or six containers and a very tiny Kubernetes cluster somewhere that's not what I would expect precisely."

Bassem explains that GitHub, a large-scale operation, often utilizes surprisingly simple infrastructure for high-demand services. This demonstrates that complex, distributed systems are not always necessary for scaling, and efficient use of basic resources can be highly effective.

"We need to build literally for the next order of magnitude so if we are at zero today which is built for 10x or 100x if we are at 10x or 100x we build for the other order right 1000 1 million and so on and so forth."

The speaker emphasizes a pragmatic approach to system design, advocating for building systems to handle the next significant increase in scale rather than attempting to predict and build for distant future demands. This suggests a strategy of iterative scaling based on observable growth.

"The problem with system design is again a lot of people want the fancy stuff but they the boundaries for when you need to scale are very blurry there are no concrete empirical numbers that tell you like when you hit this particular scale you need to do this and when you hit this particular number you need to do that."

Bassem points out that the decision-making process for scaling is often unclear, lacking precise metrics to guide engineers. This ambiguity leads many to adopt complex, "fancy" architectures prematurely, driven by a desire for advanced solutions rather than necessity.

"The argument that I had is in this case it actually doesn't matter for me the part of the benefit that we have a lot of information out there people can self-educate is now also turning into this pitfall where complex system design is almost I think in most industries where we don't actually have high availability across the globe is not needed yet."

The speaker discusses how the abundance of accessible information on complex system design can paradoxically lead to over-engineering in contexts where such complexity is not yet required. This suggests that readily available knowledge can become a trap if not applied judiciously to actual needs.

"So what I've done for example in that industry is I've literally sat on a truck and went there and I sat with every single individual who works in that terminal to really understand what they go through on a daily basis."

Bassem describes a method of deeply understanding business constraints by immersing himself in the daily operations of users, even to the point of experiencing their work firsthand. This highlights the importance of empathy and practical understanding of the end-user's context when designing technical solutions.