Synchronization is bad for scale
In the early days of Mailgun I started working on a distributed lock service. Something I had worked on briefly at Rackspace. Even as I implemented the thing, I had the sneaky suspicion that it was a bad idea.
Hasnain says:
“Since synchronization is literally built into the database, it’s very tempting to use the Database and the transactions they provide as the synchronization point for EVERYTHING. I would advise caution here, because the database is an expensive part of; and often is THE MOST EXPENSIVE part of your infrastructure. It’s better suited for storing bits on disk, than for synchronizing all of the things for you. If you rely on the DB for synchronization, you will inevitably need to shard and rebalance your database in order to continue scaling, and BTW, you are scaling the most expensive part of your infra.”
Posted on 2024-07-06T22:00:22+0000