On When To Scale

It's never clear cut when you should scale in advance or if you ain't gonna need it.

At Amazon, in my capacity as a principal engineer, I was often the bad guy.

"This design won't scale," was a common refrain of mine. I would then launch into a laundry list of why their approaches wouldn't work.

At Prime Video, my last team, we had an assumption of scale. We serviced hundreds of millions of customers in nearly 200 countries. We served vid…