Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#171

Post by Nextgrid » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

gogs wrote: post #159

We kind of moved away from this monolithic setup tho. Oh you can scale-up your hardware like we used to, it will work, until some point. And the day you will need to split your services will come quickly. This is a perfect solution for early stage projects if you're in a startup or for a personel project, but monoliths are....well....monoliths.

The only thing that is hard/impossible to scale (without tradeoffs) is stateful services like databases, and those won't go away even if you move to microservices.

Appservers can be trivially scaled horizontally regardless of whether it's one process that does all (monolith) or a mess of microservices.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#172

Post by Nextgrid » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

whoevercares wrote: post #148

_xnmw wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is complexity-as-a-service which abstracts away so much that you pay a HUGE price when it's time to scale -- and it's a confusing matrix of tradeoffs. I find it easier to login to a server, "sudo apt-get install" and tail some logs, than to try to manage the monstrosity that is AWS. Products that go horizontal-cloud-first are easy to scale, but burn an order of magnitude more money, with far worse realtime perfor…

In the long run and for most higher global nationwide scale AWS/GCP will be cheaper from 1) general reduced price every few quarters/years 2)private contract. It’s important to realize those cloud providers does a whole bunch of work to reduce cost internally so customers can pay less (eventually)

AWS and competing clouds are a non-starter for anything resource intensive such as processing lots of data (needs tons of CPU/GPU) or serving/moving lots of it (needs tons of bandwidth).

The costs are bearable for early-stage startups that are mostly typical web applications with little resource requirements, or bigger startups that have so much VC money they are happy to burn it, but beyond these two scenarios clouds are very bad value for money.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#173

Post by lumost » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #172

whoevercares wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run and for most higher global nationwide scale AWS/GCP will be cheaper from 1) general reduced price every few quarters/years 2)private contract. It’s important to realize those cloud providers does a whole bunch of work to reduce cost internally so customers can pay less (eventually)

AWS and competing clouds are a non-starter for anything resource intensive such as processing lots of data (needs tons of CPU/GPU) or serving/moving lots of it (needs tons of bandwidth). The costs are bearable for early-stage startups that are mostly typical web applications with little resource requirements, or bigger startups that have so much VC money they are happy to burn it, but beyond these two scenarios cloud…

Generally, application level decisions will have a bigger influence on cost than underlying compute storage for large data processing applications.

Tradeoffs that will dominate the costs

1. Are you using a fast language or a slow language? (10-100x cost difference)

2. Are you using an efficient storage format such as parquet? (10-100x cost difference)

3. Are you using a reasonably efficient query planner job processor? (1-10x cost difference).

4. Are you using a good algorithm for the data processing task? meaning a good efficient SQL, An efficient imperitive algorithm etc. (unbounded cost difference)

The above tradeoffs will have a cost difference of up to 10^5 ( or greater depending on point 4). Once you account for risk, utilization, capex, and people costs. The cost difference between different compute platforms is usually negligible to the above points.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#174

Post by mattmcknight » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #72

exhaze wrote: post #66

Three independent, but somewhat related thoughts on this topic: 1). On HOWTO articles about infra (1/2): I'd like to see more articles that lead with requirements, rather than setups that then justify the setup with requirements. Like, congrats, you managed to host a bunch of web applications via containers on a dedicated server. It's really nice for a super personal project and I'm sure it helped OP gain a lot of op…

The problem with AWS is that you can’t really do anything without understanding 1. IAM, and 2. VPCs/networking. And these are probably the two most complicated parts. For DIY you’re probably best off avoiding AWS

When I am helping out people new to AWS, this is where 90% of the problems are. It suggests to me that they are lacking sensible defaults, when so many people have trouble and I just recommend connecting Beanstalk to RDS. I think some meta recipes that give you a set up where this is already secure and working make sense.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#175

Post by mattmcknight » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

whoevercares wrote: post #151

unclebucknasty wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this feeling when I first started with AWS years ago. It was hard to find a good overview and all of the Amazon doc on individual services seemed to start in the middle. So, a lot of my initial understanding came through intuition, and trial and error. For many scenarios, you can completely ignore IAM, but it's definitely not advisable. On the VPC side, it's actually fairly straightforward, but you may need to…

But how can we trust the DIY stuff meet compliance and hold the right security bar? It’s much easier to do with AWS. Or maybe as a startup, to-C website you don’t really care

I think the complexity can lead to its own set of security risks, as people just keep opening permissions wider until things connect.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#176

Post by dhc02 » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #170

> Whenever I add a new service, I record the exact docker run command I used to launch it and refer to it when I need to re-create the containers for whatever reason. I know that this is an area that could use improvement; it's quite manual right now. I'd be interested to hear about some kind of light-weight solution for this that people have come up with. Later... > I host my own analytics ... They provide an open-s…

> Wouldn't docker-compose be the "already doing it" answer to the first question? It's pretty much your library of 'exact docker run commands', plus sugar to manage the running ones collectively.

I'm also confused why he's not using compose. Perhaps he is unaware that when you have multiple services in a compose file, re-running `docker compose up` only restarts containers whose parameters have changed in the compose file.

He mentions further down that he's using compose for one service, so obviously he is aware of it.

But I can't blame him. When getting up to speed on docker, I found that figuring out compose and how to use it effectively was frustratingly under-documented.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#177

Post by Nextgrid » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #173

Nextgrid wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS and competing clouds are a non-starter for anything resource intensive such as processing lots of data (needs tons of CPU/GPU) or serving/moving lots of it (needs tons of bandwidth). The costs are bearable for early-stage startups that are mostly typical web applications with little resource requirements, or bigger startups that have so much VC money they are happy to burn it, but beyond these two scenarios cloud…

Generally, application level decisions will have a bigger influence on cost than underlying compute storage for large data processing applications. Tradeoffs that will dominate the costs 1. Are you using a fast language or a slow language? (10-100x cost difference) 2. Are you using an efficient storage format such as parquet? (10-100x cost difference) 3. Are you using a reasonably efficient query planner job processo…

What about the cost of optimizing the process? If compute can be obtained very cheap elsewhere, it may be cheaper to just use that with an inefficient process rather than spend time/money optimizing the process and then running it on expensive compute.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#178

Post by laurent92 » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

mirekrusin wrote: post #147

_xnmw wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is complexity-as-a-service which abstracts away so much that you pay a HUGE price when it's time to scale -- and it's a confusing matrix of tradeoffs. I find it easier to login to a server, "sudo apt-get install" and tail some logs, than to try to manage the monstrosity that is AWS. Products that go horizontal-cloud-first are easy to scale, but burn an order of magnitude more money, with far worse realtime perfor…

Exactly, at this decade it's still a ripoff = huge margin for them, but market is there, one can't deny that. It'll even out eventually so they're on par with smaller shops and dedicated/colocation, eventually they'll have no choice but to cut margins and leverage scale to kick out smaller competition, they'll delay it, of course, as much as possible with lock-in dark techniques etc – but at the end there is no reaso…

No:

- They’ll leverage GDPR to make it only possible to comply to all privacy standards (SOC, credit card management…) if you use AWS,

- Worse, they’ll provide special Linux repos with vulnerability fixes that only they provide. Log4j can make all your distributions obsolete in a single day, and only Amazon Linux users will have that patch, this quickly.

- Then insurances will stop covering people who deploy their software manually, because vulnerabilities are too prone to happen.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#179

Post by praveen9920 » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

I tried something like with a ec2 instance.

It may be easy to maintain it as all your hosted services are in one place.

Main problem I faced is that the server has become single point of failure which caused lot of issues with customers. It’s really hard to explain why all your services are down at once.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#180

Post by laurent92 » Fri, Dec 31, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

jlkuester7 wrote: post #115

nicoburns wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with AWS is that you can’t really do anything without understanding 1. IAM, and 2. VPCs/networking. And these are probably the two most complicated parts. For DIY you’re probably best off avoiding AWS

This 1000%. It was amazing how much more comfortable I was with my suite of VPS's when I moved them from AWS to Digital Ocean! I always describe on-boarding with AWS as "drinking from a firehouse". There is so much to understand and it is hard to tell what you should actually care about. DO, on the other hand, has a much simpler set of services that seem much more applicable to 'non-enterprise' usage. (Plus the docum…

I have a recruitment problem. If I tell recruits “We use AWS”, they’ll be happy the be waterboarded when trying to do something, they’ll have the feeling of being in connection with the rest of the world, preparing their resume for the future.

If I tell them “I have Digital Ocean, I maintain the load balancer myself, the database myself, ELK myself, and you’ll be expert in Postgres, Ansible, Nginx and Debian”, I sound like an old fart.

The future for them in AWS is a click-on-the-button deployment and they’ll master nothing.