I'm surprised to see only one comment with the word "reliability" in it. I almost laughed when I saw examples from Google and Twitter. The article and the comments, sadly here as well as on the site, betray a shocking unfamiliarity with technical problems that really big systems face, user-facing or not. Making them distributed (which I guess is comparable to these "discrete services" the author mentions) does indeed have its problems, but... well ask Amazon and Google how much they regret making their distributed systems reliable. I bet there's some other path they would rather have traveled in order to simplify their architecture! Snarkiness aside, those are awful, misguided examples, even if the (I think) main point is true, that startups probably don't need to worry about such scaling issues yet.