So, you have an app. You can’t change the code. Now this isn’t the common case when I try to scale things. I usually roll up my sleeves and ignore application stack boundaries. This is a unique case where for political reasons, I can’t touch the app. So.. the app was a tiny little site, then it got popular on facebook and collegehumor and instead of pushing 5-10 megabits, it was falling apart at around 105 megabits due to resource saturation (one box wasn’t enough) and ended up needing to push 200 megabits.
Today’s Internet has changed quite a bit from the Internet I used to know. The Internet has always been successful because of net neutrality. What’s net neutrality? It’s complicated, but essentially it means that anyone anywhere can publish with equal rights. These aren’t the kind of rights people usually talk about… I’m not speaking of freedom of speech. Instead, I’m talking about content being simply bits. It doesn’t matter if it comes from CNNor this blog, you as a reader can download the bits that make up the pages you see without bias or preferential treatment.
