Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is everything so scalable?

stavros.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 383 posts

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#11

Post by hsn915 »

I think it was around 2015 when everything was basically AWS and Kubernetes

The turning point might have been Heroku? Prior to Heroku, I think people just assumed you deploy to a VPS. Heroku taught people to stop thinking about the production environment so much.

I think people were so inspired by it and wanted to mimic it for other languages. It got more people curios about AWS.

Ironically, while the point of Heroku was to make deployment easy and done with a single command, the modern deployment story on cloud infrastructure is so complicated most teams need to hold a one hour meeting with several developers "hands on deck" and going through a very manual process.

So it might seem counter intuitive to suggest that the trend was started by Heroku, because the result is the exact opposite of the inspiration.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#12

Post by nycdotnet »

_ZeD_ wrote: post #6

Honestly, in my experience, the only good reason to have microservices in a "software solution" is to be able to match 1 service -> 1 mantainer/team and have a big (read "nested", with multiple level of middle-managers) group of teams, each that may have different goals. In this way it's very easy to "map" a manager/team to a "place" in the solution map, with very explicit and documented interactions between them

This is Conway’s Law: You ship your org chart.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#13

Post by hsn915 »

_ZeD_ wrote: post #6

Honestly, in my experience, the only good reason to have microservices in a "software solution" is to be able to match 1 service -> 1 mantainer/team and have a big (read "nested", with multiple level of middle-managers) group of teams, each that may have different goals. In this way it's very easy to "map" a manager/team to a "place" in the solution map, with very explicit and documented interactions between them

Nice story but the places I've seen that make use of services, there's never a "1 server -> 1 team". It's more like 20 services distributed among 3 teams, and some services are "shared" by all teams

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#14

Post by lpapez »

acron0 wrote: post #4

Ugh, there is just something so satisfying about developer cynicism. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling. I basically agree with most of what the author is saying here, and I think that my feeling is that most developers are at least aware that they should resist technical self-pleasure in pursuit of making sure the business/product they're attached to is actually performing. Are there really people out there who st…

> Are there really people out there who still reach for Meta-scale by default? Who start with microservices?

Anecdotally, the last three greenfield projects I was a part of, the Architects (distinct people in every case) began the project along the lines of "let us define the microservices to handle our domains".

Every one of those projects failed, in my opinion not primarily owing to bad technical decisions - but they surely didn't help either by making things harder to pivot, extend and change.

Clean Code ruined a generation of engineers IMO.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#15

Post by esher »

I can relate - running a small hosting business. People come up with too complex solutions. They solve problems that they'd wish to have. For instance: HA setups are complex. If not done correctly, like in most cases, people don't gain the additional '9' from the SLA.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#16

Post by llm_nerd »

This piece is written with a pretty cliche dismissive tone that assumes that everything everyone else does is driven by cargo-culting if not outright ignorance. That people make these choices because they're just rushing to chase the latest trend.

They're just trying to be cool, you see.

Here's the thing, though: Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability. These two patterns are effectively interchangeable. Having your infra costs be "$100 per month" (a claim that usually comes with a massive disclaimer, as an aside) but then falling over for a day because your DB server crashed is a really, really bad place to be.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#17

Post by the8472 »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #3

I've seen startups killed because of one or two "influential" programmers deciding they need to start architecturing the project for 1000TPS and 10K daily users, as "that's the proper way to build scalable software", while the project itself hasn't even found product-market fit yet and barely has users. Inevitably, the project needs to make a drastic change which now is so painful to do because it no longer fits the…

1000TPS isn't that much? Engineer for low latency and with a 10ms budget that'd be 10 cores if it were CPU-bound, less in practice since usually part of the time is spent in IO wait.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#18

Post by nicoburns »

yobbo wrote: post #10

Many startup business models have no chance of becoming profitable unless they reach a certain scale, but they might have less than 1% probability of reaching that scale. Making it scalable is easy work since it is deterministic, but growing customers is not. Another perspective is that the defacto purpose of startups (and projects at random companies) may actually be work experience and rehearsal for the day the fou…

I guess the work is deterministic, but it often (unintentionally) makes the systems being developed non-deterministic!

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#19

Post by blueflow »

llm_nerd wrote: post #16

This piece is written with a pretty cliche dismissive tone that assumes that everything everyone else does is driven by cargo-culting if not outright ignorance. That people make these choices because they're just rushing to chase the latest trend. They're just trying to be cool, you see. Here's the thing, though: Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability. These two patterns are effective…

> Here's the thing, though: Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability.

How is that supposed to happen. Without k8 involved somehow?

Post reply on HN