61–70 of 91 posts
Something that would have made Gopher protocol proud to coexist along in this exclusive class.
Probably could save even more money in bandwidth cost with mostly unsecured HTTP.
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I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…
Buuut... The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable. If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn't work, and the business opportunity would be lost. However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business. That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.
I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end. From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000/month (6M requests).
that processor does not exist
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…
Buuut... The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable. If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn't work, and the business opportunity would be lost. However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business. That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why do you refer them as "best practice", can we use "common practice" instead?
There's a Dilbert (rather than an xkcd for that). When everything is described by a superlative, really, it's just 'average'. Sites like Trip Advisor or Amazon, or anything with a rating system. The "average" person nearly always puts 4 or 5 stars for average products or establishments.
When I worked at a large non-American internet company, I know there were some internal discussions on how to deal with different cultural interpretations of numerical ratings (still unresolved AFAIK).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…
Buuut... The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable. If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn't work, and the business opportunity would be lost. However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business. That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.
Indeed it is a terrible idea to optimise any piece of software that's put online in the rare occurrence it becomes the next Facebook. No, it will not happen overnight. No, you can run on an autoscalable k8s on AWS setup and it will still break, you will have to completely re-architecture and write a lengthy "what went wrong" post-mortem anyway.
I feel the "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" mantra is not yet being taught in DevOps school.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not wor…
Buuut... The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable. If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn't work, and the business opportunity would be lost. However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business. That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.
Begone, Satan!
> That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.
Realistically, how many companies reach the scale of FB? If successful, they'll reach a few thousand concurrent users, which can be serviced by the monolith model, and even scaled traditionally. HN is a testament of how well this model can work.
Building an entire infrastructure around the 1e-9% chance it will have to service a FAANG-level scale of traffic is the definition of premature optimization.
Instead, setting up and maintaining this HA infrastructure is a huge resource sink, which at an early stage of a startup can make or break the project.
It's insane that this model of building for burstable scale where everything is a microservice has become so prevalent in the industry. Cargo culting whatever tech is produced by FAANGs is doing immeasurable harm. These are not best practices.
EDIT: Ah, if you were being sarcastic... Touché.
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It's curious how "best practices" would cost ~10x and require 5 devops. HN is crazy simple. Even $500/m sounds a bit high imo.
Never underestimate the tendency of many SWE's to make things more complicated than they need to be.
Pretty sure the most expensive thing is @dang's time.
What happens when @dang has to sleep?