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Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

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

#121
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> How did/does the devs create, test new code and debug issues? Can they do that locally on their local laptop? If so, how?

All those questions are irrelevant to how software gets deployed. Do whatever you want on your laptop.

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

#122
There's a lesson to be learned from the trend to move everything to Kubernetes / Docker / one VM per function.

Aside from the disadvantages of being reliant on others for timely updates and security fixes, people now believe that they need multiple gigabytes of memory to run what used to easily and comfortably fit on a single machine.

This move is being sold through security arguments that attempt to convince people that there's no real security in Unix OSes, that if one service gets compromised, the whole server gets compromised. Hmmm... That seems very familiar... Where have we seen that before? Oh, right! Windows!

Really, though, user-level security in Unix OSes has been refined and well understood for decades, yet now we're supposed to assume that people are too inexperienced to apply user-level best practices, and are therefore expected to just run everything in separate containers / VMs and not care about security because it's been delegated, roughly, to others?

That's both kicking the can down the road and opens up nefarious possibilities like wide distribution of backdoored / compromised images and containers. "Don't learn for yourself - trust us, instead" is what I see.

Really, though, I can, I have, and I do run more services on old Raspberry Pi and similar hardware than many people run on huge, 500 watt servers. It's both a waste of resources and a lost opportunity for people to participate more in their own systems' security, rather than delegating to the rest of the world where evil people constantly scheme to take things from us.

I'll happily keep showing people how to properly set up software to coexist on a single Unix OS, and will continue to call out the "containerize everything" movement for trying to dumb things down.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced it's the hiring that has shaped the scene. If you're hiring, you want to be able to add/replace people as easily as possible. If you're being hired, you want to charge as much as you can. And to satisfy those two demands, the current web stack is great. Almost like it's been built for it. It's got very little to do with the tech itself, a lot more to do with market dynamics. That's the problem it's tryi…

The root cause is the decade of zero interest rates which led to companies intentionally overcomplicating their stacks to justify neverending VC rounds. Early prospective employees took notice and adjusted their skills as a result. The dangerous part is that in the meantime we've got brand new and budding talent that actually took this charade seriously and effectively got high on their own supply, seeing this perfor…

I think you're mixing up cause and effect. Low interest rates caused investors to chase higher returns in things like VC, VC had pressure to make investments, startups had easy money, so they were less scrappy and had more funding for overengineering.

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

#124

Gonna throw out an anti-cirlcenjerk take: We know. Absolutely no one has ever said that your super basic webapp that has the latency requirements of "make sure it works", an SLO of "it's fine most of the time", and a code base under 10k lines of code worked on by one guy, needs these super complicated systems. Even FAANG will run internal services and dashboards on a single binary, but when every second of downtime c…

I wouldn't say complexity and reliability are correlated, worse, it's an inverse correlation.

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

#125
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…

> 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…

> honestly, who needs the ability to manage complex applications with any semblance of ease?

The argument being made here is majority of applications are rarely complex and hence dont require managing that complexity.

A simple webservice fronted by a simple reverse proxy like Caddy running on a single "modern PC" can do wonders without any Kubernetes needing to get involved.

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

#126
post #49
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion here is not the method of deployment, but the infra architecture. You don't need k8s, containers, and multiple cloud instances to automate deployment. It's perfectly possible and simple to implement a button to deploy on a single machine. Heck, on OVH or Hetzner, you can have a dedicated bare metal machine with many cores and RAM exclusive to you, cheaper than famous cloud instances. These bare metals…

You can deploy k8s on a single machine though. This way you get the benefit of a standardized, documented API without the burden of multiple machines.

This is the best joke I've heard all week. Standardized in what way? By who or what governing body?

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

#127
post #22

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

Most companies are too full of themselves to do an honest assessment of their uptime requirements though. Every company out there loudly claims they need 100% uptime, which grifters will be happy to sell them knowing nobody will actually put their solution to the test and if it does fail they'll have a myriad of moving parts to shift the blame to. If you look at the very few things that do actually need 100% uptime (…

There are very specific reasons why real time stock market doesn't run in the cloud and there's a lot they're doing that very much aligns with best practices. Your example doesn't really say what you seem to think it does.

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

#128
post #22

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

Most companies are too full of themselves to do an honest assessment of their uptime requirements though. Every company out there loudly claims they need 100% uptime, which grifters will be happy to sell them knowing nobody will actually put their solution to the test and if it does fail they'll have a myriad of moving parts to shift the blame to. If you look at the very few things that do actually need 100% uptime (…

I’ve worked a few places that clearly stated:

* we are not mission critical for our customers. Let’s not engineer for disaster scenarios when our customers really won’t care if we have a very very rare outage.

* our customers primarily used our services during US business hours. If we needed risky maintenance, we’d just do it a bit early or a bit la tree in the day.

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

#129
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you guys don't see the value of being able to click on a button on a website to deploy, perfectly, everytime over some guy sshing into the box and running git pull I dunno what to tell you.

> If you guys don't see the value of being able to click on a button on a website to deploy, perfectly, everytime over some guy sshing into the box and running git pull I dunno what to tell you.

Maybe clicking a button that sshes into the box and runs git pull?

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

#130
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…

Great book
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