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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#151

Post by hrimfaxi »

wongarsu wrote: post #126
hrimfaxi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your regulatory environment, it can be cost-effective to not have to maintain your own data center with 24/7 security response, environmental monitoring, fire suppression systems, etc. (of course, the majority of businesses are probably not interested in things like SOC 2)

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. Preferably rent two servers, because reliablity. Once you outgrow renting servers you start renting rack space in a certified data center…

> 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??

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#152

Post by wongarsu »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #151
wongarsu wrote: post #126

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. Preferably rent two servers, because reliablity. Once you outgrow renting servers you start renting rack space in a certified data center…

> 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??

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-...

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#153

Post by [deleted] »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #151
wongarsu wrote: post #126

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. Preferably rent two servers, because reliablity. Once you outgrow renting servers you start renting rack space in a certified data center…

> 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??

[deleted]

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#154

Post by [deleted] »

ahoka wrote: post #70
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

Are those over engineered systems even actually scalable? I know teams who designed a CQRS architecture using messages queues and a distributed NoSQL database and fail to sustain 10req/s for a read in something that is basically a CRUD application. Heck once someone literally said "But we use Kafka, why aren't we fast?!".

[deleted]

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#155

Post by amluto »

skydhash wrote: post #100
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…

I look at what I can do with an old mac mini (2011) and it’s quite good. I think the only issue with hardware is technical maintenance, but at the scale of a small companies, that would probably be having a support contract with Dell and co.

Small companies should never forget to ask Dell, etc for discounts. The list prices at many of these companies are aspirational and, even at very small scale, huge discounts are available.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#156

Post by simianwords »

gaoshan wrote: post #124
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…

Anyone that says, "they don’t have to manage infrastructure" I would invite them to deal with a multi-environment terraform setup and tell me again that about what they don't have to manage.

While terraform is not ideal it is much much more easy to deal with managed services in AWS than to deal with on premises baremetal servers.

Most are biased because they like dealing with the kind of issues in on premises.

They like dealing with the performance regressions, heat maps, kernel issues etc. Because why not? You are a developer and you need some way to exercise your skills. AWS takes that away and makes you focus on the product. Issues arising from AWS only requires you talking to support. Most developers get into this industry for the love of solving these problems and not actually solving product requirements.

AWS takes away what devs like and brings in more "actual" work.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#157

Post by drob518 »

hedora wrote: post #135
drob518 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the silliest things you can do to cripple your performance is build something that is artificially over distributed, injecting lots of network delays between components, all of which have to be transited to fulfill a single user request. Monoliths are fast. Yes, sometimes you absolutely have to break something into a standalone service, but that’s rare.

I've notice a strong correlation between artificially over-distributing, and not understanding things like the CAP theorem. So, you end up with a slow system that's added a bunch of unsolvable distributed systems problems on its fast path. (Most distributed systems problems are solvable, but only if the person that architected the system knows what they're doing. If they know what they're doing, they won't over-distr…

Yes, that too. If you look at the commits for Heisenbugs associated with the system, you have a good chance of seeing artificial waits injected to “fix” things.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#158

Post by jstimpfle »

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…

Something that does not scale to 10k users is likely so badly architected, it would be faster to iterate on it if it was more scalable hence better architected and more maintainable.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#159

Post by walkabout »

BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

Around 2013 I was handling bursts up to thousands of requests per second for multi-megabyte file downloads with dynamic authentication using just PHP5, Apache2, and Haproxy, with single-node MySQL (or may have been MariaDB, by then?) as the database, and Redis for caching. On a single mid-range rented server. And Haproxy was only there for operational convenience, you could cut it out and it'd work just as well. No CDN. Rock solid.

My joke but not-actually-a-joke is that the Cloud is where you send a workload that's fast on your laptop, if you need it to be way slower. The performance of these fussy, over-complicated, hard-to-administer[1] systems is truly awful for the price.

[1] They're hypothetically simpler and easier to administer, but I've never seen this in the wild. If anything, we always seem to end up with more hours dedicated to care & feeding of this crap, and more glitchiness and failures, than we would with a handful of rented servers with maybe a CDN in front.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#160

Post by intrasight »

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…

I ran a SaaS for 10 years. Two products. Profitable from day 1 as customers paid $500/month and it ran on a couple of EC2 instances as well as a small RDS database.

Another thing one has to consider is the market size and timeframe window of your SaaS. No sense in building for scalability if the business opportunity is only 100 customers and only for a few years.

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