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

Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 251 posts

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#91

Post by worik »

api wrote: post #16
lewisjoe wrote: post #9

I can confirm. I've had quite a few projects that made it to the front page of HN and handled the traffic like cake. All of them ran on 5$ digital ocean droplets. I accept some projects are more resource expensive than others, but majority of the time you can get away with a bit of asynchronous responses + scheduler/queue to spread the load horizontally over time. Unpopular opinion: I blame the new age devops culture…

The problem with devops replacing the old title “sysadmin” was that the dev part dragged in the worst thing about developer culture: the love of complexity and the tendency to build massive towers of it. Sysadmins usually avoided complexity because their attitude toward it was more sensible: it’s expensive, fragile, and tends to actually multiply failure modes. I also blame cloud marketing. This stuff is a gigantic m…

> The problem with devops replacing the old title “sysadmin”....

That is a very good observation.

I think that now I am going to stop using the term Dev Ops and start using System Administration.

Wise words, thank you

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#92

Post by cpncrunch »

toenail wrote: post #22

If you don't care about downtime or reliability, sure.

It depends. I've had close to 100% uptime with my single server, whereas one of my customers who has hundreds of AWS servers has had some pretty severe downtime (hours at a time) due to some screw-up on their end. Complexity creates its own risk.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#93

Post by eddd-ddde »

tayo42 wrote: post #57
amtamt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That for sure is not "idealistic devops", but someone missing fixing RBAC to let devs have access to logs of their workload.

Maybe without details or knowing exactly what he means. But I've worked with people that decided you don't get to see any logs on a server except for a select few through some web ui or a log aggregator.

I know what you are talking about, unfortunately it's way worse than that.

The same guy that runs the k8s is the guy that "reviews" my PRs. It's also the same guy that can't get eslint into our PR process, and the same guy that merges code from other people that just out right brick the server because it had some bad syntax.

I _wish_ my problems were caused from too strict standards and procedures. But really is just a lack of understanding and cooperation.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#94

Post by Aachen »

barishnamazov wrote: post #71

I have been running multiple web apps with decent traffic (each ~10K requests per day) at no cost at all. Oracle Free Tier [1] for backends with Cloudflare tunneling [2] and pages [3] for frontend integration. Works fully seamless. [1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ (4 cores, 24 GB ram for free; switch to PAYG to avoid idleness shut down, but you still pay nothing) [2] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/…

Somehow hearing of getting free hosting from Oracle makes me think of the advice to not stick your "thing" in crazy. It's probably fine, but I'd not touch it if it can be avoided, especially if I can just pay a small and fair fee at another provider (or, in my case, self host it)

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#95

Post by richardw »

znpy wrote: post #61
lewisjoe wrote: post #9

I can confirm. I've had quite a few projects that made it to the front page of HN and handled the traffic like cake. All of them ran on 5$ digital ocean droplets. I accept some projects are more resource expensive than others, but majority of the time you can get away with a bit of asynchronous responses + scheduler/queue to spread the load horizontally over time. Unpopular opinion: I blame the new age devops culture…

> I've never come across a devops person who'd say "Hey, that sofware is too simple to prematurely scale for sudden spikes of irrational amounts of traffic, so why not just deploy it on a cheap vps?" Was a devops engineer at my previous job. We already had k8s clusters setup, pre-made CI templates and pre-tailored helm charts (along with monitoring and much more). All those things you (a developer) could mostly clone…

But you’ve got 100 developers. That’s not “most web apps”, that’s firmly in the set of companies that need standardisation and potential scale, where the devops team makes the life of many devs far better. When it’s just a few devs and cash is limited, the business doesn’t need the complexity. It’s mostly for ego and branding.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#97

Post by ByQuyzzy »

Majority of tech companies could run on just a handful of nerds. But VC comes in, pretty soon you've got a bunch of lawyers telling you you need HR people, more lawyers, people to run ERGs. Soon you've got server farms all over the world to handle a couple dozen simultaneous users, thousands of employees, and you've made it!

Then the board fires you.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#98

Post by acabal »

eyegor wrote: post #77
acabal wrote: post #56

At Standard Ebooks we serve a respectable number of page views and ebooks each month - and have been on the front page of HN three or four times - all of it done with a single 4GB VPS. And the only reason we upgraded to 4GB from 2GB is because we needed more RAM for the server to build the extremely large Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ebook - if it weren't for that, our 2GB server would still have been just fi…

A lot of resources go to scaffolding for containers, runtimes, caching, etc. 4gb would make for a chugging experience if you run a Java spring boot backend for example. But an old school php + postgres stack would be fine, or modern dotnet, rust, etc. And honestly I'm not sure it matters since ram and compute is cheap for most small-medium sites (at worst maybe $30-50/mo vs $10-20/mo). VPS services are pretty cheap t…

Of course. The entire point is that so much of that is just unnecessary for 90% of web projects. Most projects that are basically a front-end website backed by a local DB can get by on a 2GB VPS if they embrace classic web tech and don't get sucked in to whatever framework/cloud service/container craziness is hot this week. Once they start hitting millions of page views a month, we can talk about upgrading to 4GB :)

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#100

Post by ProblemExplorer »

lewisjoe wrote: post #9

I can confirm. I've had quite a few projects that made it to the front page of HN and handled the traffic like cake. All of them ran on 5$ digital ocean droplets. I accept some projects are more resource expensive than others, but majority of the time you can get away with a bit of asynchronous responses + scheduler/queue to spread the load horizontally over time. Unpopular opinion: I blame the new age devops culture…

> unnecessarily complicated with k8s

Kubernetes is/was a way to fight off walled gardens from cloud providers. The other path would have been to learn the bespoke implementation of each cloud provider depending on what that employer ended up using.

Kubernetes was at the right place, at the right time just as AWS was trying to force feed people their own proprietary solution, as Azure was trying to wall off people into their own walled garden, as GCP was being Google just not giving a damn about any other usecase than what works great at a massive search company.

With Kubernetes, developers can learn one API to deploy their applications and hopefully it works on AWS, Azure, GCP, DO, OVH or a laptop at home.

So that way, developers can learn one thing and transfer their knowledge at an employer that hosts on AWS, and then another that hosts on Azure and so on.

This is in contrast to the experience of a Python developer who's mastered FastAPI/Flask/SQLAlchemy and feels absolutely lost in a Django project or an Angular developer who stares a Next.js project wondering what the heck is happening and how it all works. Neither a Next.js or an Angular developer would start off with an AWS Amplify solution if they could help it.

Post reply on HN