I often spend time with startups that are interested in building really successful, great big and hugely profitable companies. Thinking big thoughts from the beginning ...

One of the things that these guys see in the fabric is an opportunity to cleanly scale as they gain customers. Rather than living with the limitations of traditional architectures, these guys figure to start right from the beginning.

I Mean Full Service

Now I should point out when I say I work with guys like this, well I mean exactly that.

In fact, I'm even hosting a company that's currently in stealth mode at my house. I don't mean near my house, I mean in my house. 24 x 7! Eat, sleep, and WORK there ... one of the guys doesn't even have a car, so not much slackin' happening with that team. I even cook sometimes, which is way more than any combinanator-y thingee is doing, to be sure.

They're doing some great new stuff that I think will turn into a pretty cool platform in a very under-served market, so they're planning to succeed.

That's why they're relying on Appistry to help them handle success. By making that choice they can focus on their core functionality, and we'll ensure that their platform will scale as needed, run on commodity, be mindlessly simple to operate, and just work.

Why Did They Do This?

Pretty simple. Since EAF handles scale, they can just plan for success from day one. No need to scramble when they're successful, no fear of driving away traffic.

Maybe Microsoft can survive their widespread Xbox Live problems over the recent holidays, but there's not a startup on this planet or ten others that would make it. When you get your chance to impress a new visitor, your stuff better work well.

Starts With a Decision

It might have been necessary in Mesozoic Era of Web 2.0 to just throw something together to see if anybody cared, then build it over if you found out somebody does ... but to do that anymore is just dumb.

I suppose I ought to put that in more elegant terms ... to plan on redoing your applications for each major surge in growth is poor business.

So plan on scaling beyond your wildest imaginations. That may seem like a Captain Obvious statement, but it can be easy to overlook. And overlooking this point can lead to BIG problems.

OK Is Good Enough

Recently I was working with another stealth-mode startup that also has some very cool new stuff. This cool new stuff has two major areas - they already had decided to use the fabric to impart all of the fabric goodness to part 1. So far so good.

Then we got to part 2 and that's where their plans still needed some work. As we went through the system architecture for that part it became clear that most traffic eventually hit against a single database.

Egads!

I got pretty worked up in this conversation, made an impassioned plea for DBs being the store of last resort, pointed out how basically every site that has gone to serious scale has moved DBs out of the transaction flow. Stuff like eventual consistency, shards, and many other interesting techniques are absolutely required for serious scale.

I even talked about how the evolution of Digg (and here) is a perfect example of deconstructing the DB.

All to no avail - they were happy with the single DB.

This really puzzled me. These are seriously smart guys about to make a really bad decision. One that everybody who's gone far down that path knows is a really bad decision. Why are thinking this way?

The Root of the Problem

As we talked some more (and I calmed down a bunch ... mostly) the reason why became clear - they're not planning to need any scale in the customer-facing part of their app.

In other words, they're not planning on world domination, sucking up every possible web visitor and turning them into a sticky customer, building the sort of traffic that drives the very real Bubble 2 economics (at least this bubble has very real revenue streams!).

So naturally they' were satisfied with OK. But I doubt if their future investors will be.

Moral of the Story

My guess is that upon further reflection they'll see that making all of their apps fabric-enabled, making them capable of running on a lovely uber scalable, reliable grid of commodity boxes (your own or cloud-based) just makes sense.

It's in their interest and it's easy ...

So my guess is that they will do what the other company (the one that I'm hosting in my house) did from day one - decide to fabric-enable everything, so that their crazy business guys can do everything possible to obtain every customer possible for as long as possible, driving as much total revenue as possible ...

... and live happily ever after!

(well maybe the fabric can't help with that last point, but it can do all the other stuff!)