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Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

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Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#161

Post by juliogreff »

blacklight wrote: post #107

Booking.com - at least until I left in 2018, not sure about now. Their code base is (still) mostly in Perl (5), running on uWSGI bare instances, installed on KVMs deployed on a self-hosted infrastructure.

I left B.com in early 2020, and they had been using Kubernetes for newer services (I actually worked on the deploy tooling), but until I left nothing of consequence had been moved to containers yet. The overwhelming majority of their workloads still ran on bare metal indeed, and to be really honest I still kinda miss it sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#162

Post by jenkstom »

usaphp wrote: post #126
tharne wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What works for us is to do the simplest thing that works, then iterate. The older I get, the more often I'm reminded that this un-sexy approach is really the best way to go. When I was younger, I always thought the old guys pushing boring solutions just didn't want to learn new things. Now I'm starting to realize that after several decades of experience, they simply got burned enough times to learn a thing or two h…

Or it could be that you just became old and don't want to learn new things anymore ))

This is the antivax sentiment of the IT world. It's new! It's shiny! Give me some Ivermectin because I know things other people don't! (Yes, I realize you're probably joking. I'm not, particularly.)

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#163

Post by caffeine »

tharne wrote: post #89
smilliken wrote: post #35

My company runs without containers. We process petabytes of data monthly, thousands of CPU cores, hundreds of different types of data pipelines running continously, etc etc. Definitely a distributed system with lots of applications and databases. We use Nix for reproducible builds and deployments. Containers only give reproducible deployments, not builds, so they would be a step down. The reason that's important is t…

> What works for us is to do the simplest thing that works, then iterate. The older I get, the more often I'm reminded that this un-sexy approach is really the best way to go. When I was younger, I always thought the old guys pushing boring solutions just didn't want to learn new things. Now I'm starting to realize that after several decades of experience, they simply got burned enough times to learn a thing or two h…

Being really good at using boring tech is better than being a noob with cool tech.

So as you get older and you get more competent, the relative benefits of boring tech grow.

Whereas if you’re a noob at everything, being a noob with cool tech is better.

If the problems are hard enough, and you are competent, you iterate on boring tech for a while to solve the hard problems, and then it becomes cool tech.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#164

Post by cespare »

eckesicle wrote: post #156
cespare wrote: post #119

We run on thousands of EC2 instances and our biggest systems operate at millions of requests/sec. No containers*. We use EC2, Route53, S3, and some other AWS stuff, plus custom tooling built on their APIs. Most of our code is Go or Clojure so deployments generally consist of self-contained artifacts (binary or jar) plus some config files; there's little to no customization of the instance for the application. *Well w…

Would you mind naming the company you work for? It sounds like a really nice place to work.

I work at Liftoff (https://liftoff.io/). It is indeed a great place to work! Join me :) https://liftoff.io/company/careers/

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#165

Post by spicybright »

mateuszf wrote: post #157
tra3 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choose boring technology [0]. For me, the choice is a trade off between the journey and the destination. Destination is the final objective of your project, business value or whatever. The journey is tinkering with "stuff". Depending on the project there's value and enjoyment in both. [0]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

> Chose boring technology Doesn't fit in this case, I'd say Nix is still cutting edge. It may also be simple, but it's not easy (in the Rich Hickey sense).

Can you elaborate more? From what I've generally heard, Nix has been a good foundation for a lot of companies.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#166

Post by seti0Cha »

Place I worked until recently had (and probably still has) the majority of the site running on bare metal. Java stack, home grown RPC framework, home grown release system that boiled down to a whole lot of rsync and ssh commands by one controller script which knew how to do things in parallel. Configuration was through files which lived in source control. Our servers were hand packed, which would have sucked except we had a fairly limited number of (gigantic) services. We handled load on the order of millions of requests per minute. It actually worked surprisingly well. Our biggest pain point was slow startup times from giant services and sometimes needing to move groups of services around when load got too heavy.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#167

Post by spicybright »

repomies69 wrote: post #160
goodpoint wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such "new things" are just a big bunch of unnecessary complexity.

Sometimes yes. But it is impossible to know for sure. New things still get adopted, some of those new things actually stick and provide value

And at the very least, being old lets you be able to evaluate these new things more accurately.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#168

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

jenkstom wrote: post #162
usaphp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it could be that you just became old and don't want to learn new things anymore ))

This is the antivax sentiment of the IT world. It's new! It's shiny! Give me some Ivermectin because I know things other people don't! (Yes, I realize you're probably joking. I'm not, particularly.)

What does ivermectin have to do with anything? Are you suffering from chronic parasitic infection?

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#169

Post by NomDePlum »

javajosh wrote: post #158
anonymousDan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Availability?

Why isn't "we're going to risk downtime to speed up our BTD loop for cheap" a good answer?

I've made that very decision.

Partly forced due to internal resource constraints. However, swapping getting a working system out and tested with real users instead of waiting an undefined time to get high availability didn't lose me any sleep.

It's also the case that some systems can withstand a degree of downtime that others can't, or it's not worth paying the cost for the perceived benefit gained.

Re: Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?

#170

Post by KaiserPro »

Large VFX places used to not use containers for large scale stuff.

Where I worked we had something like 40k servers running about 80 different types of software. It was coordinated by pixar's alfred, a single threaded app that uses something that looks suspiciously like the athena widget set. ( https://hradec.com/ebooks/CGI/RMS_1.0/alfred/scheduling.html )

It was wrapped in a cgroup wrapper to avoid memory contention

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