Experience the thrilling and terrifying moment when your app goes viral and your database starts gasping for air.
Picture this: You built an amazing app that started small - just you and a few friends using it. Your tiny was happily handling 100 writes per second, humming along perfectly on a small EC2 instance with MySQL running on port 3306.
Then the magic happens - your app goes viral! 🚀
Sudenly you're getting 200 writes per second... then 500... then 1,000! Your database is screaming for help, queries are timing out, and users are getting angry.
This is every developer's dream and nightmare rolled into one.
Your first instinct? Scale up! More CPU, more RAM, more everything! You click a few buttons on AWS and boom - your database can now handle 1,000 writes per second. Crisis averted!
But then... it happens again. More users, more traffic, and suddenly you're hitting 1,500 writes per second. You try to scale up again, but your cloud provider says: "Sorry, this is the biggest machine we have."
Key Insight: "Vertical scaling has a limit - there's only so big a single machine can get. When you hit that ceiling, you need a completely different strategy."
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