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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

#161

Post by polishdude20 »

makerdiety wrote: post #68
evrimoztamur wrote: post #33

In fact, a single five euro server can run: My personal website, Two multiplayer game servers for the games I built, frp for tunnelling; and I'm planning on squeezing more in until it gives up. All reverse-proxied by nginx under subdomains of my personal domain address, absolutely seamless. Similarly, other applications I built so far all also run under five euro VMs. There's no denying you might need more because yo…

> Similarly, other applications I built so far all also run under five euro VMs. There's no denying you might need more because you have serious peaks in traffic that you cannot handle with only one server, but do the accounting. A simple proportional-integral-derivative controller equipped onto your server resource can help you see if future traffic spikes are occurring. The question is, what kind of person is able…

Wait what would a PID controller do? What would it be controlling?

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

hparadiz wrote: post #27
api wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by hparadiz »

zer00eyz wrote: post #113
hparadiz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use k8s over just a docker container?

Dont deploy docker in production. Podman. You could but why all the extra overhead?

Docker has no overhead on the Linux kernel. It just runs things for you via LXC. The overhead is no different from any other process.

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

#165

Post by polishdude20 »

abound wrote: post #24
nadermx wrote: post #3

A $5 VPS, with almost any app, can handle the front page of hacker news. If I remember correctly I'd even venture to say hacker news runs on a one or two core box. It should be the standard

Hacker News might not be the best example, as it seems to get overloaded once every week or two, usually when a contentious/high volume topic comes up.

And despite that, hackernews is as popular as ever. I think the moral of this story is that having some downtime isn't a big deal.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

hparadiz wrote: post #42
banku_brougham wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People arent missing the value, nobody is saying it wont perform as advertised -- the discussion is about the cost.

Setting up a testing & deploy via a CI script is basically free. AWS gives away CodeDeploy for free. Ansible is open source. I learned all this stuff working on open source stuff where platforms like GitHub give you free compute time.

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by acabal »

jameshart wrote: post #141
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…

More applications should consider git as a content management database. It's great architecture. Statically serving files built by a CI process running on the server is very tidy. But let's be clear, your serving infrastructure is able to be that simple because you outsource donation management to https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org , contribution management to https://github.com/standardebooks , collaboration, me…

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; this is a people problem and not a technical one. Likewise, another people problem is that it's not possible to accept money online without involving a 3rd party service like Fractured Atlas or Stripe or PayPal.

(Moving away from GitHub towards a self-hosted Git solution, and away from Google Groups to a self-hosted mailing list, is actually on our long-term todo list[1]).

All those things don't mean one can't run one's web app on a single tiny server, like we do. I still argue that outsourcing the basic fundamentals of one's web app, like the OS, runtime, or database to some cloud service, or resorting to flavor-of-the-month frameworks or containers, or doing silly things like using Javascript to render one's entire frontend, often simply result in complexity, slowness, and bloat.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#...

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

#168

Post by jameshart »

acabal wrote: post #167
jameshart wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More applications should consider git as a content management database. It's great architecture. Statically serving files built by a CI process running on the server is very tidy. But let's be clear, your serving infrastructure is able to be that simple because you outsource donation management to https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org , contribution management to https://github.com/standardebooks , collaboration, me…

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; this is a people problem and not a techni…

Fully agree and endorse.

But my point is... those are all web applications too, and they don't have the option of outsourcing everything. Someone has to build a system that does more than just serve static files.

The claim that 'the majority of web applications can run on a single server' is kind of belied by the example of a site where not even the majority of sub-applications that are required to provide the full functionality of the system are running on a single server.

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

#169

Post by vbezhenar »

ongy wrote: post #136
josephcsible wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just because Kubernetes makes it unreasonably hard to configure access to logs like that?

It's really not that hard if you got proper users. But doing proper users on k8s is hard. I suspect they just run with admin credentials and no real way to generate users.

For small cluster you can just create service account for a user, create token for it and write it in the kubeconfig. Then assign role to this service account and that's about it.

The main issue with this approach is that you can't organize those "users" into a groups. But for a small number of users you can just create all rolebindings and be done with it.

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

#170

Post by acabal »

jameshart wrote: post #168
acabal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; this is a people problem and not a techni…

Fully agree and endorse. But my point is... those are all web applications too , and they don't have the option of outsourcing everything. Someone has to build a system that does more than just serve static files. The claim that 'the majority of web applications can run on a single server' is kind of belied by the example of a site where not even the majority of sub-applications that are required to provide the full…

Of course! Stripe, Paypal, Postmark/Sendgrid/whatever are not part of the majority I'm talking about. (Although Fractured Atlas, which is merely a wrapper for the Stripe API, is; we use it because it solves a people problem, not a technical one.) There are certainly projects and businesses that will require many high-power servers and more complex technical machinery than basic LAMP. However most people on HN are not developing the next Stripe, even if they don't realize it yet.
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