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What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

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Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#51

Post by stavros »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #43

I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…

I use it for the same purpose as well, a friend left on a trip and his fridge lost power, spoiling thousands of dollars worth of his small baking business materials.

I set up a phone with Tasker, if the phone stops charging or fails to check in, it sends an alert.

Luckily, and as you say, monitoring changed the situation, as it never failed since.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#52

Post by [deleted] »

tothrowaway wrote: post #50
cuu508 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer the question of why four of them: * the traffic from the monitored systems comes with spikes. Looking at netdata graphs, currently the baseline is 600 requests/s, but there is a 2000 requests/s spike every minute, and 4000 requests/s spike every 10 minutes. * want to maintain redundancy and capacity even when a load balancer is removed from DNS rotation (due to network problems, or for upgrade) There are sp…

I didn't realize you were getting that many requests per second. That's quite remarkable when you only have 18 app cores available. In my experience, you're lucky if you can get Django to service a request in 10ms. So I'd expect closer to 40 cores to handle that level of traffic. I suppose since it is spiky, and not a particularly latency sensitive application, you can get by with fewer cores.

[deleted]

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#53

Post by capableweb »

exdsq wrote: post #44
capableweb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days. Is it? What functionality are you thinking about that absolutely require more than that? I find that most ideas even today can be solved with a web server + DB, while developers today like to over-engineer things and think about scaling a service for a million users while they haven't even figured out the value propositi…

If you’re programming autonomous weapons for fighter jets it tends to require a little more than a web server, or so I’ve heard!

Well, I'd say it's more rare to work on autonomous weapons for fighter jets than not, wouldn't you agree?

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#55

Post by trvz »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #43

I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…

> i very much fear arriving at a summer house where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks.

Usually there's little any single person can do, but this waste of electricity is very selfish considering climate change.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#56

Post by finnlab »

stavros wrote: post #51
8fingerlouie wrote: post #43

I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…

I use it for the same purpose as well, a friend left on a trip and his fridge lost power, spoiling thousands of dollars worth of his small baking business materials. I set up a phone with Tasker, if the phone stops charging or fails to check in, it sends an alert. Luckily, and as you say, monitoring changed the situation, as it never failed since.

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#57

Post by welterde »

threeseed wrote: post #33
skc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days. I feel like the overwhelming majority of web based software projects can be catered for with exactly this setup. If it's rare it's because everybody's drunk the Kool-aid

Maybe in the past, sure. But these days people rely far more on their web apps. Having a 1-2 day outage because your architecture is not highly-available across data centres like this one just doesn't cut it. And multi-day outages are very much real because of the thundering herd effect as companies rapidly try to move between data centres exhausting capacity. And much of the complexity in modern day architectures co…

It's already multi-datacenter, since the servers are distributed across multiple datacenters on the Falkenstein campus (and they also have other locations in their eco-system).

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#58

Post by cuu508 »

tothrowaway wrote: post #50
cuu508 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer the question of why four of them: * the traffic from the monitored systems comes with spikes. Looking at netdata graphs, currently the baseline is 600 requests/s, but there is a 2000 requests/s spike every minute, and 4000 requests/s spike every 10 minutes. * want to maintain redundancy and capacity even when a load balancer is removed from DNS rotation (due to network problems, or for upgrade) There are sp…

I didn't realize you were getting that many requests per second. That's quite remarkable when you only have 18 app cores available. In my experience, you're lucky if you can get Django to service a request in 10ms. So I'd expect closer to 40 cores to handle that level of traffic. I suppose since it is spiky, and not a particularly latency sensitive application, you can get by with fewer cores.

I've got a small program written in Golang for handling the HTTP "ping" requests. There's also rate limiting, not every request makes it past NGINX.

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#59

Post by dicknuckle »

stavros wrote: post #51
8fingerlouie wrote: post #43

I never realized that Healthchecks.io was a one man show. I'm almost ashamed to say that i've been using the free tier for years. I moved from self hosted to the free tier when i killed off all of self hosted services, and i don't have much legitimate use for it, having it attached to a backup of a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge in my summerhouse :) I do use it for a purpose it probably was not designed for :) In my…

I use it for the same purpose as well, a friend left on a trip and his fridge lost power, spoiling thousands of dollars worth of his small baking business materials. I set up a phone with Tasker, if the phone stops charging or fails to check in, it sends an alert. Luckily, and as you say, monitoring changed the situation, as it never failed since.

"The doctor is in" or "It doesn't do that when a mechanic looks at it"

Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software

#60

Post by tyingq »

fasteo wrote: post #41

> HAProxy 2.2 for terminating TLS connections, and load balancing between app servers. Enables easy rolling updates of application servers. Wonder why he is not using hetzner's load balancer [1]. At least cost-wise, the savings are huge (4xAX41-NVME are around 160€; LB31 - the most expensive one - is 36€) [1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/load-balancer

It's kind of interesting that there's more horsepower/cores in the load balancers than in the downstream web/app servers...4xAX41 vs 3xAX41. So I imagine something is different about the workload there versus a typical load balancer.
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