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The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

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Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#21

Post by gloob »

nopassrecover wrote: post #9
olefoo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requirements that are uselessly vague. "Architected to never go down"? That's not a requirement, that's wishful thinking. It's as useful a requirement as "Must be attractive to Unicorns." Engineering a web scale service for robustness is a series of tradeoffs, increasingly expensive tradeoffs as you make the system proof against bigger threats. Geographical redundancy alone more than doubles your costs, and (if you'r…

You're missing the point. This isn't a job ad, it's a question about what would you pick to use if you had to develop a web app. "Architected to never go down" should be read as "Stability is important". No web stack will satisfy everything the author asks for, but they are bringing up all the different factors (or at least most of the broad ones) that need to be considered when making an architecture decision. How w…

The fact that you are already bringing up all your expertise on redundancy shows that you can think about this better than others and probably give an answer that fits this requirement well.

Unless we completely reinterpret the requirements (as per your suggestion), (s)he really can't. It is impossible to meet the requirement "Architected never to go down."

What actually confuses me more than anything is how wildly the strength of the writer's connection to reality varies. I mean, two of the "requirements" are:

  # Architected to never go down
and

  # Employs security features
The first is impossible. The second is trivial. All software employs some sort of security feature - the alternative is for the software to be perfectly insecure.

Eh, I dunno.

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#23

Post by moe »

9oliYQjP wrote: post #18
moe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense but a million hits/day doesn't have much to do with scalability. That comes down to 11 hits/sec - a single midrange server will deal that without breaking a sweat. Add one or two orders of magnitude, then you're talking about scalability.

In theory and on average, a million hits per day will come down to 11 hits per second. What you're more likely to see in practice though is huge peaks and troughs in load. The average might be 11 hits per second. But the peak load could be 100 hits per second around lunch and the minimum load could be 2 hits per second at 4 AM. Moreover, a hit is a rather arbitrary unit of measure. 11 hits per second to the Twitter A…

Yes, I ignored the bell curve due to the nature of the site - should have made that clear.

There's not much point even taking that into account for a read-only affair like SO at such a small scale because the cache is doing the work here and that won't sweat even under 100 or 500 reqs/sec.

Anyways, you point out correctly that discussing scaling-issues is rather fruitless without taking all variables into account. I was just trying to say that "SO (in particular) is handling 1mio reqs/day" does not tell much about the performance of the underlying stack.

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#24

Post by nopassrecover »

agnokapathetic wrote: post #19
nopassrecover wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that is true and plentyoffish.com uses ASP.NET too. I'm just thinking like Amazon/Google/Facebook big and whether that would become an issue.

Myspace was originally written in Coldfusion, they ported to ASP.NET and the current system handles 1.5 Billion page views per day and up to 2.3 million concurrent users (source: MIX Conference 2006 http://www.andreas-kraus.net/blog/handling-15-billion-page-v... )

Thanks!

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#25

Post by nopassrecover »

jrockway wrote: post #13
nopassrecover wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that is true and plentyoffish.com uses ASP.NET too. I'm just thinking like Amazon/Google/Facebook big and whether that would become an issue.

I'm just thinking like Amazon/Google/Facebook big and whether that would become an issue. Yeah, why solve problems that you actually have when you can fantasize about solving problems you don't have instead?

Good point.

However, the whole topic of this thread is fantasising about the perfect stack for that massive site. Besides which, 30 seconds now could save one year in the future (just think if Netscape had thought ahead).

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#26

Post by nopassrecover »

gloob wrote: post #21
nopassrecover wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. This isn't a job ad, it's a question about what would you pick to use if you had to develop a web app. "Architected to never go down" should be read as "Stability is important". No web stack will satisfy everything the author asks for, but they are bringing up all the different factors (or at least most of the broad ones) that need to be considered when making an architecture decision. How w…

The fact that you are already bringing up all your expertise on redundancy shows that you can think about this better than others and probably give an answer that fits this requirement well. Unless we completely reinterpret the requirements (as per your suggestion), (s)he really can't. It is impossible to meet the requirement "Architected never to go down." What actually confuses me more than anything is how wildly t…

I think that you are taking this as a programmer (i.e. too literally).

If I asked you to recommend a car that is fast and safe you wouldn't reply "all cars are fast" and "no car can be perfectly safe", you would suggest a car that maximises those requirements.

Similarly, the author is looking for what frameworks/stacks maximise (among other things) reliability and security.

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#27

Post by nopassrecover »

idlewords wrote: post #14

I think of this kind of tool wank as "Guitar Center development" - the conviction that choosing the perfect combination of web framework, revision control system, programming language, data store, templating engine and web server is a prerequisite to building an awesome app. It's exactly analagous to the idea that you can't truly shred until you've assembled the right set of effects pedals, preamps, niobium-plated st…

Definitely true.

But we each still like to think about that perfect Gibson Les Paul Custom we would have if we were a rockstar..

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#28

Post by olefoo »

idlewords wrote: post #14

I think of this kind of tool wank as "Guitar Center development" - the conviction that choosing the perfect combination of web framework, revision control system, programming language, data store, templating engine and web server is a prerequisite to building an awesome app. It's exactly analagous to the idea that you can't truly shred until you've assembled the right set of effects pedals, preamps, niobium-plated st…

This is one of the few times I wish I could upvote someone more than once.

The painful truth about web services is that it doesn't matter what tools you use; at least initially. If it does something useful and you are getting revenue you can and will rearchitect and rework the solution as it grows. And as a system grows it tends to become heterogeneous, an all php shop will suddenly sprout a java based search engine, an ASP.NET shop will throw a linux box in front of it's app servers to act as a reverse-proxy filter/load balancer, and so on. The really good thing about the current state of the art is that you have a multitude of tools available to solve any given problem. The issue is you need to have people who have experience with more than one toolset to make sensible decisions and be able to pick the right solution for the task at hand.

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#29

Post by nopassrecover »

jrockway wrote: post #12

Note the byline: "Senior Analyst, Forrester Research". To non-programmers like the author, this sort of article is reasonable. Programming is not a creative art, it's just about buying some tools that you read about in the trade magazine.

While I agree with your sentiment I'm not sure if that's definitely the case.

First, when you have an average level of programmer (as the sort of corporations that would hire a senior analyst tend to), selecting the right tools is where you can innovate against your competition.

Second, if this wasn't written by a non-programmer, but instead was an Ask-YC "What stack would you use to build the next Google/Facebook/Amazon etc." I don't think this same criticism would be levelled at the author.

Re: The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?

#30

Post by jrockway »

nopassrecover wrote: post #29
jrockway wrote: post #12

Note the byline: "Senior Analyst, Forrester Research". To non-programmers like the author, this sort of article is reasonable. Programming is not a creative art, it's just about buying some tools that you read about in the trade magazine.

While I agree with your sentiment I'm not sure if that's definitely the case. First, when you have an average level of programmer (as the sort of corporations that would hire a senior analyst tend to), selecting the right tools is where you can innovate against your competition. Second, if this wasn't written by a non-programmer, but instead was an Ask-YC "What stack would you use to build the next Google/Facebook/Am…

Wouldn't you want to hire a senior programmer to make programming decisions?
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