How We Built the Next Gen Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Small Team
In this technical retrospective (2012), @fogus shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 14 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 3 comments
I must live in a bubble, protected from the real world, because a lot here surprises me. Is it common for corporations to doubt the reliability of Amazon? This whole paragraph was a surprise to me:
"They wondered if Amazon was reliable. This might seem like a strange thing, but in their world, the world of proprietary infrastructure, which is remarkably unreliable, it made sense. Literally, they wanted to know how many nines, how many OC-48s, disaster recovery, etc. They wondered if Amazon scaled. "
Is this normal? Do large corporations simply assume that proprietary technologies are better than anything else?
Also: This is the first story I know of where a startup committed 100% to Clojure, and then had a reasonably successful end for the story. As such, I think this story is important.
This also was a big surprise to me:
"I laid some of the skepticism to rest once I was able to explain that Clojure was a JVM-hosted language, which meant that much of the Java ecosystem could be leveraged, including debugging tools, profiling, etc. Although no one said so aloud, I think that they took this to mean that if the acquisition was completed, the system could be migrated to Java. Heh heh."
So big corporations are so committed to Java that they won't even consider anything else?
It's great that you seem to have settled on Clojure after 2 complete rewrites which apparently you have the time and money for but that also sounds like you might end up rewriting the whole thing once you don't like something about Clojure. I hope you really did your due diligence this time.