In defense of simple architectures • Hacker News Board

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#11

Post by danielvaughn » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

ilovecaching wrote: post #8

The vast, vast, vast majority of organizations don't need micro services, don't need half of the products they bought and now have to integrate into their stack, and are simply looking to shave their yak to meet the bullet list of "best practices" for year 202X. Service oriented architectures and micro services solve a particular problem for companies that are operating on a massive scale and can invest (read waste m…

I'd never worked with micro-services before this latest freelance project. I start working with this platform that is basically "note taking but with a bit of AI/ML". So okay, a bit of complexity with the ML stuff, but otherwise a standard CRUD app.

The application itself is a total of 3 pages, encompassing maybe 20 endpoints at the most, with about 100 daily active users. For the backend, some genius decided to build a massive kubernetes stack with 74 unique services, which has been costing said company over $1K/month just in infra costs. It took me literally weeks to get comfortable working on the backend, and so much stuff has broken that I have no idea how to fix.

Not only that, but the company has never had more than 1 engineer working on it at a time (they're very small even though they've been around a bit). If there were such a thing as developer malpractice, I'd sue whoever built it.

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#12

Post by trasz » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #9

I think the biggest problem for most developers is not understanding what one computer can actually do and how reliable they are in practice. Additionally, understanding of how tolerant 99% of businesses are to real-world problems that could hypothetically arise can help one not frustrate over insane edge case circumstances. I suspect a non-zero number of us have spent time thinking about how we could provide determi…

Also, those complicated architectures are often quite unreliable anyway - just in ways that don't show in metrics. Slack comes to mind: not only its functionality is poor compared to eg IRC, but it fails in hilarious ways, eg showing duplicated messages, or not showing them at all. Another example is YouTube - the iOS app gets confused when displaying an ad, which results in starting the playback at a wrong time offset. I guess it's because companies like those don't care about actual reliability - what they do care about is availability.

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#13

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:20 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #6

taeric wrote: post #2

My favorite trap in all of this, is that this thinking will fail most tech interviews. It is incredibly frustrating.

Trap or integrated win-win? We use one of these "aggressively simple" architectures too. At this point, I would quit my job instantaneously if I had to even look at k8s or whatever the cool kids are using these days.

> look at k8s or whatever the cool kids are using these days.

I'm fine with complex architecture and would actually welcome someone choosing something complex but the issue is that we have perverse incentives at work to introduce stuff just to pad our resume.

Kubernetes was designed for companies deploying thousands of small APIs/applications where management is a burden. I've seen companies that deploy 3 APIs running Kubernetes and having issues...

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#14

Post by joshlemer » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:21 PM UTC

trasz wrote: post #12

bob1029 wrote: post #9

I think the biggest problem for most developers is not understanding what one computer can actually do and how reliable they are in practice. Additionally, understanding of how tolerant 99% of businesses are to real-world problems that could hypothetically arise can help one not frustrate over insane edge case circumstances. I suspect a non-zero number of us have spent time thinking about how we could provide determi…

Also, those complicated architectures are often quite unreliable anyway - just in ways that don't show in metrics. Slack comes to mind: not only its functionality is poor compared to eg IRC, but it fails in hilarious ways, eg showing duplicated messages, or not showing them at all. Another example is YouTube - the iOS app gets confused when displaying an ad, which results in starting the playback at a wrong time offs…

How could you say that Slack has poor functionality compared to IRC?

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#15

Post by snvzz » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

trasz wrote: post #12

bob1029 wrote: post #9

I think the biggest problem for most developers is not understanding what one computer can actually do and how reliable they are in practice. Additionally, understanding of how tolerant 99% of businesses are to real-world problems that could hypothetically arise can help one not frustrate over insane edge case circumstances. I suspect a non-zero number of us have spent time thinking about how we could provide determi…

Also, those complicated architectures are often quite unreliable anyway - just in ways that don't show in metrics. Slack comes to mind: not only its functionality is poor compared to eg IRC, but it fails in hilarious ways, eg showing duplicated messages, or not showing them at all. Another example is YouTube - the iOS app gets confused when displaying an ad, which results in starting the playback at a wrong time offs…

Slack comically uses gigabytes of RAM and plenty of CPU time in the client side.

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#16

Post by musicale » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:30 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #15

trasz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, those complicated architectures are often quite unreliable anyway - just in ways that don't show in metrics. Slack comes to mind: not only its functionality is poor compared to eg IRC, but it fails in hilarious ways, eg showing duplicated messages, or not showing them at all. Another example is YouTube - the iOS app gets confused when displaying an ad, which results in starting the playback at a wrong time offs…

Slack comically uses gigabytes of RAM and plenty of CPU time in the client side.

It's a nice demonstration of the efficiency of web apps vs. native apps.

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#17

Post by aadvark69 » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:32 PM UTC

Simple architectures work well, until they don't. A good example is ye olde ruby on rails monolith. Dead simple to set up and iterate quickly, but once you reach a certain organization and/or codebase size, velocity starts to degrade exponentially

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#18

Post by exfascist » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:32 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #14

trasz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, those complicated architectures are often quite unreliable anyway - just in ways that don't show in metrics. Slack comes to mind: not only its functionality is poor compared to eg IRC, but it fails in hilarious ways, eg showing duplicated messages, or not showing them at all. Another example is YouTube - the iOS app gets confused when displaying an ad, which results in starting the playback at a wrong time offs…

How could you say that Slack has poor functionality compared to IRC?

When you type something into IRC that message shows up in the log and every online users client pretty reliably. Furthermore the high degree of diversity among clients provides a pretty extreme amount of client side functionality that Slack completely lacks (scripting is a huge one.)

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#19

Post by zrail » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:38 PM UTC

surfer7837 wrote: post #5

Just boils down to not optimising until you need to. Start with a 3 tier web app (unless your requirements lead you to another solution), then start with read replicas, load balancing, sharding, redis/RabbitMQ etc

Realistically almost every web app can start as a one-tier web app that uses SQLite as a data store and serves mostly HTML.

Re: In defense of simple architectures

#20

Post by adra » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 8:38 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #6

taeric wrote: post #2

My favorite trap in all of this, is that this thinking will fail most tech interviews. It is incredibly frustrating.

Trap or integrated win-win? We use one of these "aggressively simple" architectures too. At this point, I would quit my job instantaneously if I had to even look at k8s or whatever the cool kids are using these days.

Man, kubernetes is so much easier than the smattering of crap that you have to jungle together before it. Puppet and co? No thanks. Terraform? It's fine, but only a part of a CI/CD picture. If you think the alternatives are better, I really have to wonder how much of the trenches crap that people in your org deal with regularly that you're insulated from. That, or you're a release-quarterly kinda company?