What is amazing to me is that they did scale to 400 million monthly active users with less than 50 engineers... In 2014.
That is: on hardware from seven years ago and older. Which is an eternity in tech. Since then we've seen incredible new hardware come out (EPYC 2 in 2018 for example).
One can wonder: up to how many MAU could a service scale today, on today's hardware, with a small team? And what about tomorrow's hardware...
Seven years can be an eternity in tech, but is it an eternity counting from 2021? I mean, AWS launched in 2006, Netflix expanded to Europe in 2012, Docker had their initial release in 2013 and so on, so none of these major events are that "new" anymore. Obviously things have changed (a lot) during the past seven years, but have they changed as much as they did between 2007 and 2014?
What I'm saying is that for the general case of "scaling with few engineers", it seems to me that the tools available matter a lot more than the specifics of what hardware is available at the time. Launching an international service "from scratch" with a small team and a modest budget just wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, but not because CPUs were too slow.
That is: on hardware from seven years ago and older. Which is an eternity in tech. Since then we've seen incredible new hardware come out (EPYC 2 in 2018 for example).
One can wonder: up to how many MAU could a service scale today, on today's hardware, with a small team? And what about tomorrow's hardware...
This is fascinating.