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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#181

Post by f1shy »

huflungdung wrote: post #94
sgarland wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

What I say is that we massively underestimate just how fast computers are these days

In 2010 I was managing 100 servers, with many Oracle and Postgres DB, PHP, Apache, all on Solaris and Sun HW. I was constantly impressed by how people were unable to do more or less correct estimations. I had a discussion with my boss, he wanted to buy 8 servers, I argued one was more than enough. The system, after growing massively, was still in 2020 managing the load with just 3 servers. So I would argue, not only today, but 15 years ago already.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#183

Post by dt3ft »

Because Microsoft, Google and Amazon, to name a few, sell the story of the cloud to decision makers who can sign a subscription contract. Developers go with the flow, not daring to question the setup. Meanwhile, they host their own servers on a r-pi and ship sideprojects. Devs are not at fault here. It’s the management.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#185

Post by danielmarkbruce »

jwr wrote: post #5

I don't get this scalability craze either. Computers are stupid fast these days and unless you are doing something silly, it's difficult to run into CPU speed limitations. I've been running a SaaS for 10 years now. Initially on a single server, after a couple of years moved to a distributed database (RethinkDB) and a 3-server setup, not for "scalability" but to get redundancy and prevent data loss. Haven't felt a nee…

It's not about scalability. It's about copying what the leaders in a space do, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. It's pervasive in most areas of life.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#186

Post by wongarsu »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #175
wongarsu wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner [1]. Bandwidth is 1 GBit/s. You can also get 10 GBit/s, that's hidden away a bit instead of being mentioned on the order page [2] 1: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex 2: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/network/10g-...

How is that any different from cloud? This whole thread was a response to > Today at AWS, it is easily possible for people to spend a multiple of the cost of that hardware setup every month for far less compute power and storage. suggesting to use a few beefy servers but if we are renting them from cloud we're back where we started.

The difference from the big clouds is that an equivalent instance at AWS costs 10x as much. If you go with few beefy servers AWS offers very little value for the money they charge, they only make sense for "cloud native" architectures. But if you rent raw servers from traditional hosters you can get prices much closer to the amortized costs of running them yourself, with the added convenience of having them in a certified data center with 24/7 security, backup power, etc.

If you want more control than that, colo is also pretty cheap [1]. But I'd consider that a step above what 95% of people need

https://www.hetzner.com/colocation

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#187

Post by rustystump »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #176
darkwater wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to remove admin rights to your admins then, because scrappy enough DevOps/platform engineers/whatever will totally hand-edit your AWS infra or Kubernetes deployments. I suffered that first hand. And it's even worse that in the old days, because at least back in the day it was expected.

Or at least you have to automatically destroy and recreate all nodes / VMs / similar every N days, so that nobody can pretend that any truly unavoidable hand-edits during emergency situations will persist. Possibly also control access to the ability to do hand edits behind a break-glass feature that also notifies executives or schedules a postmortem meeting about why it was necessary to do that.

Oh no it ran out of disk space because of bug! I will run a command on that instance to free it rather than fix bug. Oh no error now happens half of the time better debug for hours only to find out someone only fixed a single instance…

I will never understand the argument for cloud other than bragging rights about burning money and saving money which never shoulda been burning to begin with.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#188

Post by MattGaiser »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #120
sgarland wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

Have always felt the same. I’ve seen an entire company proudly proclaim a modern multicore Xeon with 32GB RAM can do basic monitoring tasks that should have been possible with little more than an Arduino. Except the 32GB Xeon was far too slow for their implementation...

How did they implement it? That's horrendous.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#189

Post by goodpoint »

DrScientist wrote: post #27

Isn't it simple as the following? Break your code into modules/components that have a defined interface between them. That interface only passes data - not code with behaviour - and signal the method calls may fail to complete ( ie throw exceptions ). ie the interface could be a network call in the future. Allow easy swapping of interface implementations by passing them into constructors/ using factories or dependenc…

Yes, you are missing the cost of complexity and network calls. You are describing a distributed monolith. It does not help.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#190

Post by ahartmetz »

iknowstuff wrote: post #165
hrimfaxi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book. What's the bandwidth and where can I rent one of these??

https://us.ovhcloud.com/bare-metal/prices/?display=list also pretty sure 24 cores is like 48 cloud “cores” which are usually just hyper threads right?

IME, a cloud "core" is even worse than a hyperthread. I'm not sure if they oversubscribe, or underclock, or if it's virtualization overhead... but anyway, not great.
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