Most over engineering is career driven development. You may laugh at the people who unnecessarily use loads of microservices, specialized tools and libraries, exotic cloud solutions etc. But the architects and senior developers who do this stuff now have great high paying jobs. If you choose the simple cheap solution the client might love you (realistically they wont know the difference) but you wont be able to get those high paying jobs. Ask me how I know.
Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
111–120 of 251 posts
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#112Totally agree. Problem is that if you run your stuff on a single server you are at risk of being unhireable. Every interview I have been to, nobody asked about pragmatic,sp simple solutions that do the job, but they wanted to hear about microservices, k8s, Redis and other stuff. Based on the job postings, my company wouldn’t hire me because I don’t work with the stuff they are asking for. It seems a pragmatic solution for a dev to jump on these bandwagons. Right now it’s probably a good idea to push AI somehow into your systems. Doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not.
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#113Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#114Amen. This is a full e-marketplace I mixed together as a demo. It runs on a USD$10/mth VPS. No other overheads, licence fees, etc.
You don't have to worry about spiking because it's a "turn-based" business transaction site. So if you need two hours to shift to a larger server as the number of buyers and sellers increases, you have it.
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#115No lies. A shocking amount of architecture work is resume-driven development masquerading as “best practices” and often ends poorly.
So many difficult to troubleshoot, needlessly complex, and less-reliable services exist for no practical reason.
Lots of people need to remember they are not Google and should focus effort on what matters instead of “scale” they’ll never reach.
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#116I can confirm. I've had quite a few projects that made it to the front page of HN and handled the traffic like cake. All of them ran on 5$ 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 think that the $5 tier is a little tight for a web app as opposed to a crud app, but 2x $40 tiers is enough for a decent amount of traffic, with one as a failover. The problem is that containers are excellent, and IMO there's a gap in the market between "I want to run one container" and "I want a fully managed k8s cluster"
For my personal stuff that doesn't get any traffic I cobbled together some scripts to manage containers / SSL here https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server
I don't think I ever got around to making it self healing if a container dies, but it does support gitops style deployments through a cronjob / conf repo similar to argocd
It's been running happily on a <$10 / month aws lightsail instance for a few years now, though tbh I'd still reach for k8s for anything serious
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#117I can confirm. I've had quite a few projects that made it to the front page of HN and handled the traffic like cake. All of them ran on 5$ 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…
> Unpopular opinion: I blame the new age devops culture that made cloud app deployments unnecessarily complicated with k8s and cool new tech (that'd get them high profile jobs.)...
Ah yes, time for the annual debate on the complexities of Kubernetes versus the unparalleled genius of custom scripts that seem to work...sometimes. Because reinventing the wheel is always superior to something with a standardized API.
And let's not forget the sheer elegance of a homegrown scripts that rivals the structured approach of Kubernetes. A true testament to intuitive design.
Sure, Kubernetes might have a few minor benefits beyond 'scaling out'. But honestly, who needs the ability to manage complex applications with any semblance of ease?
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#118Can the majority of webapps run on a single machine? Probably. Do most of your customers expect close to 100% uptime? Yes. Does one machine provide the uptime required by your customers? Most definitely not.
how many websites out there realistically need close to 100% uptime?
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#119I 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…
> All those things you (a developer) could mostly clone, slightly customize and ship both to a development k8s cluster and to a prod k8s cluster (with all the safety nets already in place).
How did/does the devs create, test new code and debug issues? Can they do that locally on their local laptop? If so, how?
Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
#120Tech debt exists for the same political reasons than bullshit jobs.
There are few incentives to simplify, and the bigger your budget the more internal political power you have. It's especially true at larger companies where it's ok to be inefficient thanks to your monopoly.