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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?

#381

Post by speleding »

alex_duf wrote: post #45

Hey former Guardian employee here. The Guardian has hundreds of servers running, pretty much all EC2 instances. EC2 images are baked and derived from official images, similarly to the way you bake a docker image. We built tools before docker became the de facto standard, so we could easily keep the EC2 images up to date. We integrated pretty well with AWS so that the basic constructs of autoscaling and load balancer…

> Now for a company that starts today I don't think I'd recommend that

I think for a company starting out that AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), which from your description is probably what you're using, is actually a much better way to go than docker containers, because you get a large part of the orchestration for free with the AWS EC2 auto-scaling and health detection without most of docker complexity.

(I would suggest using something like Terraform to set it up in a reproducible way though)

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

#382

Post by kitd »

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…

The simplest thing for "dev" is not necessarily the simplest thing for "ops" though.

I'm in my late 50s and been developing for 35 of them. Honestly, containers are not rocket science and solve a mountain of ops-type problems simply.

If you really are only developing a single instance to be deployed in-house, then you may find you don't need them. But as soon as your instance might possibly get exposed to more than one environment, they're a no-brainer for me.

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

#383

Post by [deleted] »

tomc1985 wrote: post #259
goodpoint wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tech knowledge churn is like 10x as fast. Spot on! Moreover, every time the wheel is unnecessarily reinvented previous lessons are lost. What is even worse is that people really want to reinvent the wheel and get defensive if you point that out. Comments like "Or is cope for a loss of neuroplasticity" are a good example.

It's outright naked ageism. I have been studying a different trade, completely unrelated to software engineering or tech, and by far the weirdest thing is reading books or watching seminars from 20 or 30 years ago that are still relevant . How much of technology writing has that honor? Very little. Like I have been obsessed with tech and computers my whole life, I studied computer stuff when all the other kids were o…

[deleted]

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

#384

Post by osener »

smilliken wrote: post #219
smilliken wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first 6 years of using Nix, it was depoyed on Ubuntu. We recently migrated to NixOS. NixOS is fantastic for other reasons that are similar but separate from Nix as a package manager/build system. It's easier to incrementally switch to Nix first then NixOS later. We don't use systemd services for our code. We only use NixOS as an operating system, not for application layer. Our code works just the same on any…

> Are you using NixOps or Morph or something else? How does your world look like without K8s and Containers? Not using NixOps or Morph. I recall considering a few others as well. In each case, I wasn't able to understand what they were doing that I couldn't do with a simple script. Instead, there's a python program that does an rsync, installs some configuration files, and runs the nix build. It deploys to any linux…

For others interested in deploying like this, this approach sounds exactly like what krops does. Krops is similar to Morph, except it does the derivative building on the remote host.

It is very simple and works great. Deploying from macOS to NixOS is possible as well.

https://github.com/krebs/krops

https://tech.ingolf-wagner.de/nixos/krops/

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

#385

Post by config_yml »

jesterson wrote: post #379

CTO at e-commerce. Operating full-chain of e-commerce from customer to supplier, including backends for planning, support, marketing, operation etc. Thousands of orders daily, millions of visitors on webfront. Not a single container. Don't see any possible use or benefits of it whatsoever. It's trendy, cool, but if you just want to get things done, avoid mess in your infrastructure and avoid accumulation of tech debt…

So what does your technology stack look like?

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

#386

Post by config_yml »

kbsali wrote: post #378

See Pieter Levels who is running alone (with the help of a freelance sys admin I believe) multiple high traffic web projects on a single VPS with crazy numbers (and supposedly a unique index.php for each project ) https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1506202608104783878

That's not distributed then (OP was asking about distributed services without containers).

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

#388

Post by krageon »

What does "at scale" mean? The stage at which distributed systems become absolutely necessary depends strongly on the technical culture and the expertise of the engineering team. Unless you are an absolutely giant vendor, you probably don't need such a stack to begin with.

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

#389

Post by bscanlan »

alex_duf wrote: post #45

Hey former Guardian employee here. The Guardian has hundreds of servers running, pretty much all EC2 instances. EC2 images are baked and derived from official images, similarly to the way you bake a docker image. We built tools before docker became the de facto standard, so we could easily keep the EC2 images up to date. We integrated pretty well with AWS so that the basic constructs of autoscaling and load balancer…

Intercom is pretty similar. We use EC2 hosts and no containers (other than for development/test environments and some niche third-party software that is distributed as Docker containers). Autoscaling groups are our unit of scalability, pretty much one per workload, and we treat the EC2 hosts as immutable cattle. We do a scheduled AMI build every week and replace every host. We use an internally developed software tool to deploy buildpacks to hosts - buildpacks are pre-Docker technology from Heroku that solves most of the problems containers do.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend building this from scratch today, it was largely put in place around 8 years ago, and there are few compelling reasons for us to switch.

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