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Learn how to design large-scale systems

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Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#161

Post by mrep »

ris wrote: post #130

I'm quite tired of everyone wanting to build "large scale systems" and play at being Netflix. The truth of the matter is the vast vast majority of people will never need to do this with their project and instead will just end up making an expensive to maintain mess with way too many moving parts. At least as important as designing something that can scale up is designing something that can scale down . You don't know…

I think you underestimate how many people work at large companies that have to deal with these problems. Not everyone is in the HN startup bubble working for a company with barely any customers.

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#162

Post by phil21 »

mrep wrote: post #161
ris wrote: post #130

I'm quite tired of everyone wanting to build "large scale systems" and play at being Netflix. The truth of the matter is the vast vast majority of people will never need to do this with their project and instead will just end up making an expensive to maintain mess with way too many moving parts. At least as important as designing something that can scale up is designing something that can scale down . You don't know…

I think you underestimate how many people work at large companies that have to deal with these problems. Not everyone is in the HN startup bubble working for a company with barely any customers.

I think you highly overestimate it. Most large companies are a series of small groups that act as companies that have nearly trivial (to the point of absurdity) engineering concerns.

Sure, a few groups in each F500 need epic skills - but I think that's an exceedingly vanishing amount of the (actual) work that is being done. The term Enterprise and what it stands for earned it's laughable reputation for a reason.

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#163

Post by closeparen »

phil21 wrote: post #162
mrep wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate how many people work at large companies that have to deal with these problems. Not everyone is in the HN startup bubble working for a company with barely any customers.

I think you highly overestimate it. Most large companies are a series of small groups that act as companies that have nearly trivial (to the point of absurdity) engineering concerns. Sure, a few groups in each F500 need epic skills - but I think that's an exceedingly vanishing amount of the (actual) work that is being done. The term Enterprise and what it stands for earned it's laughable reputation for a reason.

Building a system out of a handful of services, databases, caches, and queues is table stakes for a backend engineering intern, not "epic skills."

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#164

Post by mrep »

phil21 wrote: post #162
mrep wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate how many people work at large companies that have to deal with these problems. Not everyone is in the HN startup bubble working for a company with barely any customers.

I think you highly overestimate it. Most large companies are a series of small groups that act as companies that have nearly trivial (to the point of absurdity) engineering concerns. Sure, a few groups in each F500 need epic skills - but I think that's an exceedingly vanishing amount of the (actual) work that is being done. The term Enterprise and what it stands for earned it's laughable reputation for a reason.

My comment was definitely biased towards big tech companies where I have worked so not all of the fortune 500. That being said, I have worked on a 2 and 5 person team each managing hundreds of terabytes of data and both companies have tens of thousands of engineers.

Both companies are just are part of the large tech scene hence my skepticism about there not being many engineers that have to manage tons and tons of data/distributed systems as there are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of engineers that have to think about these problems outside of the two companies I have worked for.

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#165

Post by eloff »

closeparen wrote: post #163
phil21 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you highly overestimate it. Most large companies are a series of small groups that act as companies that have nearly trivial (to the point of absurdity) engineering concerns. Sure, a few groups in each F500 need epic skills - but I think that's an exceedingly vanishing amount of the (actual) work that is being done. The term Enterprise and what it stands for earned it's laughable reputation for a reason.

Building a system out of a handful of services, databases, caches, and queues is table stakes for a backend engineering intern, not "epic skills."

And knowing how to architect it so that it actually scales well is beyond most senior engineers. You underestimate the difficulty I think.

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#166

Post by nurettin »

ris wrote: post #130

I'm quite tired of everyone wanting to build "large scale systems" and play at being Netflix. The truth of the matter is the vast vast majority of people will never need to do this with their project and instead will just end up making an expensive to maintain mess with way too many moving parts. At least as important as designing something that can scale up is designing something that can scale down . You don't know…

There is a discrepancy between joestextile.com which will get it's first 500 regular customers in 3 years and a unity plugin that needs to scale to 10 MB/s when it gets it's first 100 regular customers in a week. Both kinds of projects are pretty common. The first one can be done in a week with RoR and a run on a 10$/mo hosting solution for years, the other requires pretty much all of the above.

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#167

Post by Jtsummers »

avinium wrote: post #156
Jtsummers wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get any real interest in my office, but I applied TLA+ to a debugging challenge. I described a well-specified system (abbreviated, for instance data was just "DATA", not the actual myriad number of message types that could be sent). The intention was to understand a bug and possibly identify which of three suspected locations it was occurring in. I had enough of the specification for each part implemented: T…

Any suggested resources/books for getting a better understanding of TLA+?

I read through a chunk of Lamport’s book and the first 7 or so sections of his online course (the rest weren’t posted yet).

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

https://learntla.com/introduction/

Is also a good introduction. That was enough to make me dangerous. Since work didn’t have an interest in training me, and I had other obligations, that’s all I’ve done so far.

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#168

Post by kungtotte »

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #137
ivanhoe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience creating cards (or writing down the words into a notebook) is an essential part of the process. I'm not sure about the exact mechanics of it, but for me writing a word implants it in my memory much deeper than just reading it.

I totally get that too, I write/draw things down and find it helps remembering things easier. Especially math. But I find the time it takes to transfer that thought onto anki is so painstakingly slow. Anki doesn't even have a dedicated shortcut key for minimizing / maximizing the add card panel either, at least for windows. don't get me wrong here I love using anki and ankidroid but adding cards is a PITA. I add card…

I've been sort of meta-learning for the past couple of weeks, reading about study methods and note taking and memory techniques, etc. and one prevailing theme regardless of the method is that repetition and rephrasing are key to internalise the information.

E.g. you learn and retain the information far more efficiently if you take the route of read -> write note -> create flashcards from the note. As opposed to autogenerating the flashcards from the source material, for example.

The process of formulating the note first and then formulating the flashcards means you have to actually think about the material in two stages instead of just performing data entry.

In my experience it doesn't take all that much time, and if you're really interested in learning a topic is it unreasonable to expect that you have to spend say 10% longer with any given book or article to perform this review process? If you spend a bit of time up front creating a structured approach and stick to it, it'll become very quick. Here's an interesting article as a reference: https://robertheaton.com/2018/06/25/how-to-read/

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#169

Post by nojvek »

ian0 wrote: post #157
ris wrote: post #130

I'm quite tired of everyone wanting to build "large scale systems" and play at being Netflix. The truth of the matter is the vast vast majority of people will never need to do this with their project and instead will just end up making an expensive to maintain mess with way too many moving parts. At least as important as designing something that can scale up is designing something that can scale down . You don't know…

Exactly. The cost of maintaining a complex distributed architecture cant be understated. Its frequently viewed in terms of technical tradeoffs but the real killer is the legion of smart people in devops and systems architecture you'll need to support it. Over-complicating things is endemic though. An aside to illustrate: Our work straddles multiple non-tech industries. Theres a common theme in software there. A thin…

I think there are definitely lessons to be learnt about building for scale yet being nimble at start. I.e if you are on GCS/AWS you can build something that costs 10’s/month and can be scaled relatively easy to handle millions of customers if such a thing were to happen.

Kind of boils down to simple things. Put assets in S3 or GCS. Have DB separate to your app, preferably if it’s in prod and you have paying clients then have at-least 3 replicas. So if one goes down or you need to do some upgrades, everything goes smooth.

You probably want to dockerize your app so you can deploy the same thing to stage and prod. It’s scary how very few companies have a proper staging environment.

But none of this matters. The first part is dead simple but hard to do “build something that people want”. Everything is secondary and useless if you’re building stuff that nobody wants.

Re: Learn how to design large-scale systems

#170

Post by some_account »

rhizome wrote: post #149
a012 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "single box" has a lot of computing units as on AWS EC2.

The figure I saw around maybe 2015 was that AWS (maybe Heroku) is 10x more expensive and bare metal is 10x more efficient/faster, lending a 100x difference in price-performance. Both factors are probably larger nowadays.

It's the convenience and the enormous ecosystem of plug and play services that make AWS do good for point and click building architectures.

You can do all of it locally (except multi zone and multi region reliability) but it would take a lot of configuration, skills and you wouldn't have the same Gui for everything.

AWS is not cheap but companies don't care, because without it, you have to pay to find experts and keep them happy, which is a lot harder.

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