Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

primevideotech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 526 posts

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#111

Post by NBJack »

mjr00 wrote: post #80
charcircuit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the teams will need to migrate sooner or later so figuring out all of the potential problems in migrating and having everyone do it an once is more efficient than each team needing to figure it out separately.

That's not how it plays out in reality. usually nothing gets done because "upgrade this package" is never on anyone's priority list. Or teams end up doing shit like JAR shading or forking and renaming a package with some _v2 or whatever suffix to be able to support both the old and new version simultaneously in the main code base. And then of course nobody ever updates the runtime (hello, enterprise monoliths still r…

I'm just grateful a language like Java has any sort of namespace solution to dependency nightmares.

I have lost track of how many times I did a git pull on a Python based solution only to find I broke all the things when I tried to upgrade one package.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#112

Post by boxed »

The_Colonel wrote: post #52
bawolff wrote: post #10

I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.

I agree, my intuition would put it to 1% vs. 99% (difficult to quantify of course). I haven't yet seen a project/product which would need microservice architecture for technical reasons. If you need to scale, you can just scale monoliths (perhaps serving in different roles). The use case for microservice architecture is IMHO an organizational / high level architecture driven. I've worked in a big company (20K employe…

I built a little microservice on the side of my monolith for PDF creation. It used headless chrome and ghostscript to render html to a nice PDF. The problem I had with having that code inside the monolith was that it increased my docker image creation for deploys by a lot. And that code pretty much never changed anyway.

I did feel a bit embarrassed having to make a microservice after having argued against them so much over the years. Hopefully I can stop producing PDFs soon so I can delete the entire thing :P

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#113

Post by NBJack »

clnq wrote: post #39
samwillis wrote: post #4

Next they will transition to on premises hardware from the cloud to save another 90%.... oh wait...

It turns out taking it offline has yet another 90% reduction in cost.

And vastly improves security!

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#114

Post by YetAnotherNick »

bawolff wrote: post #10

I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.

Microservices works better if you don't trust other team. While having trust seem like a basic thing, this is absolutely not the case for a lot of companies.

With microservices, it is easy to see services which are down or have high error rate or latency, have clear API contract and call out the team for breaking API contract, and assign cost for which the teams have incentive to reduce, or at least not increase it.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#115

Post by OtomotO »

mehdix wrote: post #84
bawolff wrote: post #10

I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.

Once I was called to a meeting in a sibling department as a cloud advisor. They wanted to migrate to AWS cloud. The conversation went as below. - Does your app work fine? - Yes. - Do you have any problems? - No. - Why do you want to migrate then? - Silence.

- Because we are innovative and it's the future! /s

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#116

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

bawolff wrote: post #10

I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.

This right here is one of the reasons I got out of software development. Not micro services in particular, but just the unthinking application of some new pattern to everything.

Everyone wants to do the new cool thing. Everyone wants it on their CV. To be followed some years later by everyone saying how awful it is, and moving on to the next fad. Rinse, repeat, round and round we go with no actual intelligence being applied.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#117

Post by deanCommie »

mehdix wrote: post #84
bawolff wrote: post #10

I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.

Once I was called to a meeting in a sibling department as a cloud advisor. They wanted to migrate to AWS cloud. The conversation went as below. - Does your app work fine? - Yes. - Do you have any problems? - No. - Why do you want to migrate then? - Silence.

Customer doesn't know their own requirements?

Your job is to figure out what they actually need even if they don't understand it?

Seems pretty par the course.

There are dozens of reasons to migrate to the cloud. Do they apply to everyone? No. Are they always worth the cost? No. But the whole "cloud vs not cloud" argument that happened, got settled ("cloud"), and is now being restarted by the DHH-like is not data-driven and full of exaggerations and fear-mongering from both sides.

Then you add on top of that that the main product of moving to the cloud is "operations" which is typically measured in "hours of human capital being impacted outside of core working hours". When the market is booming, tech humans are expensive and fickle, and don't want to undertake more operations than they should have to, and companies are forced to pay cloud providers.

But in today's 2023 climate, any company looking around to decide how much to spend on cloud just says "Why would we pay for something when we can just ask our engineers to work more hours, and invite them to quit if they don't like it, oh wait nobody else is hiring anyway"

No cost calculator of $$$ saved considers that overtime is free in our industry.

tl;dr the cloud backlash is overblown, more companies/businesses would benefit from cloud than not.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#120

Post by oblio »

abrookewood wrote: post #73
lastangryman wrote: post #68

My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…

Yep, expect the Lambda team to raise hell.

Especially now that it's on the frontpage of HN :-)))
Post reply on HN