Saturday, November 01, 2014

Macho-ism in Computer Science

It's common for me to see blog posts by companies talking about the high traffic volume in terms of QPS/RPS they handle and the amount of data they process, and that's super cool. But then there's another class of facts I see floating around a lot, and they tend to talk about the size of their hadoop or serving cluster, and things like "dozens or hundreds" of machines in your fleet seem to be something to be proud of. I don't understand this way of thinking or at least don't see the point of it. As I see things, it's nicer if you can get more done with fewer machines, and not more machines in your fleet.