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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

#241
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…

Why do you assume that only three US landscape is discussed here?

Plus I'm not very sure those statistics are reliable.

Anecdotal evidence: I have 22 years of career and I've only worked in big organizations twice, for the total of a year. Everything else was much smaller.

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

#242
post #178
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Remember that rust doesn't catch all the memory leaks… So a long running rust process might degrade the performances in the machine, slowly.

If you can give examples on how does Rust leak memory, that would be informative.

I had two services run uninterrupted for months in 2GB RAM containers. Memory increased steadily the first 5-10 minutes and then stayed there indefinitely long.

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

#243
post #22

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

The discussion isn't about reliability. It's about resource wastage. It's a bit silly to try to change the topic of the discussion. Reliability through redundancy is simple, particularly when you aren't replicating multiple machines / machine images.

Who put you in charge of the discussion?

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

#244
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.

Why would someone want to self-torture into k8s if they only need a single machine?

If you need isolation for multiple services, just use a container... I don't see an orchestration need that justifies using k8s on a single machine. For such context, it's too much hassle for very little value in return.

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

#245
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except zero interest rates stopped almost four years ago, but we're still seeing vcs ape into ai this last year. So clearly the underlying cause of this squandering of resources must come from somewhere else. I point the finger at the rising class of super rich who don't know what to do with their money. Why do they exist? Why is taxation seemingly not applying to them any longer?

> Why is taxation seemingly not applying to them any longer? Investing returns was never taxed, as long as they don't use their wealth for consumption they wont get taxed. This is a good thing since it encourages investments over excessive consumption, building a startup is much better than buying another yacht.

All this money that is aping into an ai gold rush could have been taxed to fund schools and other broadly useful things.

I'm very much a free market capitalist, but seeing all vcs ape into ai at the same time does not make me think there is value in have so many super rich people in the world.

I hate it when discussion devolves into high taxation vs low taxation or high regulation vs low regulation. There must be a thing such as the appropriate type of taxation and the appropriate type of regulation. And that depends on what we want as a society. Do we want a big class of super rich that don't know what to do with their money so they squander it on an ai gold rush? Or do we want to tax them so we can put that money to use that we all benefit from?

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

#246

We use k8s at $JOB for literally no reason other than some engineer decided he wanted to learn k8s. It's the worst, I don't even get to see my server logs because "that would mean giving you access to the entire thing". I'm not a k8s person but surely that has to be missing something. We could literally make do with a cloudflare 5$ plan and have left to work with. With better integration, and better DX.

> that would mean giving you access to the entire thing

There's clearly a skill issue at play here and your intuition is correct

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

#247
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?"

I work on the Ops side partially, and our platforms are defined by the highest level of complexity we need to support. That is to say that your basic web app can run on k8s, but that auto-scaling, messaged-based behemoth that 85% of the business flows through will not.

So I can either support k8s, or I can support k8s _and_ old-school rsync deployments to VPS'

The complexity of running a basic web app on k8s is entirely too high, but the cost of keeping an entirely separate deployment/monitoring/oncall/permissions stack for VPS' is worse. Better hope your monitoring vendor has an agent that can run in a VPS' on the OS you want, or you're back to running Nagios yourself.

If at least 1 group is going to write an app that runs on k8s, you might as well run most of the company on k8s. Otherwise you're either going to manage 2 separate stacks, and/or try to write an abstraction layer that will probably itself resemble k8s.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion isn't about reliability. It's about resource wastage. It's a bit silly to try to change the topic of the discussion. Reliability through redundancy is simple, particularly when you aren't replicating multiple machines / machine images.

Who put you in charge of the discussion?

My reading comprehension did.

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

#249
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…

> why not just deploy it on a cheap vps?

I’m that kind of a person and the usual response I get is - hey, that’s too complex!

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

#250
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if your answer to 1 RT of 200msec latency is to add 3 RT of 200msec latency, you're using a calculus I don't understand.

Sometimes API calls make 5-10 queries to the database. So it's 600ms to setup TLS and make a call at the origin server and the number of db calls is irrelevant. Or a quick TLS connection to the edge and 1000-2000ms to fulfill because of db distance. Maybe you can do some of the calls in parallel, but sometimes not. Session lookup plus another query after permissions are established and your edge latency savings are a…

Connection: Keep-Alive is your friend.
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