Why I Built Litestream

tl;dr—Despite an exponential increase in computing power, our applications require more machines than ever because of architectural decisions made 25 years ago. You can eliminate much of your complexity and cost by using SQLite & Litestream for your production applications.

When I was your age…

I can tell I’m getting old because I talk about the “good old days” of computing. Back when knowing a single programming language and SQL was good enough to work at most jobs. Back when you could build all your web pages with basic HTML skills.

But the good old days weren’t actually that good.

They kinda sucked.

In 1995, the LAMP stack emerged. It was a combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP. It’s a simple stack that all lived on one box. Unfortunately, that box was stocked with a CPU that was measured in megahertz and memory that was measured in megabytes. It was dog slow.

But Moore’s Law promised a better future as computers became exponentially faster. So why do we need more computers than ever before?

Where it went wrong

Since early web languages like PHP and Ruby were slow, you didn’t want them running on your database server so you moved them to their own servers in what is called an n-tier architecture. Now you can keep adding more stateless Ruby servers to this presentation layer and scale your application…

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