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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

#201

Post by Yeroc »

zeroCalories wrote: post #174
Yeroc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately many of these super-complicated systems run at odds to having a reliable and fast, system even when every second of downtime can be translated into lost money.

Realistically, they are required. I don't care how you do it, but you need 1. Seamless fail overs 2. Easy horizontal scaling 3. Location based load balancing 4. A way to deploy and rollback all of these automatically. As a result, things are gonna get complicated no matter what you do. But as it turns out, using something like Kubernetes, Elixir, or AppEngine can make all of that very manageable.

#3 is debatable for many, many businesses. The other three are (almost) trivial with a decent load balancer and blue/green deployments. This is something very achievable without an over-complicated architecture.

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

#202

Post by Solvency »

jameshart wrote: post #157
worik wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you took the bait! > This was at a 100+ developers organisation. IMO the vast majority of software development happens in much smaller organisations than that. Dev Ops still matters there, and the requirements are different. I am working in an organisation with one and a half developers. I am lobbying that the third of fourth developer concentrates on Dev Ops here. It is very important. Look at the back up/recove…

> IMO the vast majority of software development happens in much smaller organizations than that I guess it's okay to have an opinion about that, but this seems like something that should probably be a fact . Unfortunately, not sure I can find reliable stats on sizes of engineering organizations. The thing is, while there are obviously lots of small companies, there are also some really big software development organi…

How the hell does Walmart need 5x as many developers as Netflix?

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

#203

Post by paulmd »

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…

A ton of the problem is people turning everything into dynamic this or that. Wordpress culture, basically.

Most pages can really just serve a jekyll/astro static-generated page and be fine. But if you shove a database and php in the middle, it’s gonna be multiple orders of magnitude slower.

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

#204

Post by paulmd »

Nextgrid wrote: post #195
marginalia_nu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my search engine, back when it was hosted on a PC in my living room off domestic broadband would shrug off HN[1][2] without the fans even spinning faster than usual. And like, internet search should be more resource heavy than the sort of websites that regularly do keel over to HN. Every query is like up to 50 MB in disk reads. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/it…

The shift to cloud-based workloads (with oversubscribed CPUs and mandatory networked storage) means that a lot of people lost track of just how fast physical hardware (even mid-range consumer-grade) has become.

That’s also a deliberate thing - cloud providers have consciously avoided increasing the per-unit performance of a vcpu, you still get the same Sandy Bridge performance in 2024 as you did in 2012. They actually go all the way to the extent of having AMD design them smaller, higher-density “cloud” cores that don’t clock as high, to avoid ever increasing that vcpu unit.

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

#205

Post by jameshart »

Solvency wrote: post #202
jameshart wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO the vast majority of software development happens in much smaller organizations than that I guess it's okay to have an opinion about that, but this seems like something that should probably be a fact . Unfortunately, not sure I can find reliable stats on sizes of engineering organizations. The thing is, while there are obviously lots of small companies, there are also some really big software development organi…

How the hell does Walmart need 5x as many developers as Netflix?

Walmart has 2.3 million employees in total. The only larger employers than them in the world are armies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers

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

#206

Post by EasyMark »

Aachen wrote: post #94
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)

I'm guess they probably use open source tech and such and can move it over to a new VPS in less than a day...

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

#207

Post by throwaway17824 »

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…

Once when working in devops I asked my team lead why we didn't just move everything to Heroku, rather than reinventing a bad in-house version of their features.

I was firmly told not to suggest it again unless I wanted to put all of us out of a job.

That seemed ridiculous to me — we had a laundry list of ways we could help the business if we got basic platform stuff off of our plates. But I sure learned something about how incentives affect otherwise-good engineers.

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

#208

Post by jameshart »

ProblemExplorer wrote: post #137
znpy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then I assume you have a custom Kubernetes LB that can handle non-HTTP TCP and UDP traffic because you choosing Kubernetes and the design restrictions that comes with it does not affect how the dev solves problems? The underlying orchestrator definitely affects how the software needs to behave and is definitely not irrelevant .

Follow the signposts laid out by https://12factor.net.

Think about how to apply those ideas to containerized applications.

Consider that such applications can be run in the same way locally, on a server, or in an autoscaled cluster.

Not sure why TCP/UDP load balancing complicates matters.

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

#209

Post by erik_seaberg »

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.

PSA: please don't follow a manual checklist over ssh. At least write an Ansible playbook that does those things repeatably, or even better, script idempotent changes in an .rpm or .deb to install.

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

#210

Post by erik_seaberg »

Aachen wrote: post #108
fabian2k wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the point here changes all that much if you change this to two servers and a load balancer. That's still a pretty simple setup. But I also think that many applications are far more tolerant of small outages than you imply. And a more complex setup also adds more points that can lead to an outage even though it reduces the chance that hardware will cause one.

Wouldn't you also need two load balancers then? Otherwise you've still got a single point of failure. And how do you keep the failover system in sync? It's a whole can of worms to promise 100% uptime. It's super rare that a server physically breaks and suddenly goes dark with less than a day's warning, and for most applications such a once-in-5-years event is tolerable if that means the hosting costs are divided by f…

> super rare that a server physically breaks

I kinda want to know where you shop, because commodity hardware has a reputation as just utter crap. Before cloud went mainstream, I worked somewhere that had some racked servers in a colo literally catch fire. (The remote hands put them out, disconnected, and refused to touch them ever again.)

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