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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#171

Post by [deleted] »

bootsmann wrote: post #143
dig1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several PHP servers in front of a MySQL database that had one primary r/w with one read only replica. You'd be surprised that the most stable setups today are run this way. The problem is that this way it's hard to attract investors; they'll assume you are running on old or outdated tech. Everything should be serverles…

> The problem is that this way it's hard to attract investors; they'll assume you are running on old or outdated tech. Everything should be serverless, agentic and, at least on paper, hyperscalable, because that sells further. Investors don't give a shit about your stack

[deleted]

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#172

Post by cjblomqvist »

bootsmann wrote: post #143
dig1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several PHP servers in front of a MySQL database that had one primary r/w with one read only replica. You'd be surprised that the most stable setups today are run this way. The problem is that this way it's hard to attract investors; they'll assume you are running on old or outdated tech. Everything should be serverles…

> The problem is that this way it's hard to attract investors; they'll assume you are running on old or outdated tech. Everything should be serverless, agentic and, at least on paper, hyperscalable, because that sells further. Investors don't give a shit about your stack

Many do. For most it's not the biggest concern (that would be quite weird). AFAIK it's mostly about reducing risk (avoiding complete garbage/duck taped setups)

Source: I know a person who does tech DD for investors, and I've also been asked this question in DD processes.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#173

Post by ndriscoll »

simianwords wrote: post #156
gaoshan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> AWS takes that away and makes you focus on the product. Issues arising from AWS only requires you talking to support.

Not my experience at all. e.g. NLBs don't support ICMP which has broken some clients of the application I work on. When we tried to turn on preserve-client-ip so we could get past the ephemeral port limit, it started causing issues with MSS negotiation, breaking some small fraction of clients. This stuff is insanely hard to debug because you can't get onto the loadbalancer to do packet captures (nor can AWS support). Loadbalancing for long-lived connections works poorly.

Lambda runs into performance issues immediately for a web application server because it's just an entirely broken architecture for that use-case (it's basically the exact opposite of user-mode threads to scale: let's use an entire VM per request!). For some reason they encourage people to do it anyway. Lord help you if you have someone with some political capital in your org that wants to push for that.

RDS also runs into performance issues the moment you actually have some traffic. A baremetal server is orders of magnitude more capable.

ipv6 support is still randomly full of gaps (or has only very recently been fixed, except you might have to do things like recreate your production EKS cluster, oops) which leads to random problems that you have to architect around. Taken with NAT gateway being absurdly expensive, you end up having to invert sensible architectures or go through extra proxy layers that just complicate things.

AWS takes basic skills around how to build/maintain backend systems and makes half of your knowledge useless/impossible to apply, instead upgrading all of your simple tuning tasks into architectural design problems. The summary of my last few years has basically been working around problems that almost entirely originate from trying to move software into EKS and dealing with random constraints that would take minutes to fix baremetal.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#174

Post by kazinator »

walkabout wrote: post #159
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 C…

> 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.

Not to forget: where you send a workload that is free on your laptop, in order to be charged for it.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#175

Post by hrimfaxi »

wongarsu wrote: post #152
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??

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.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#176

Post by jkaplowitz »

darkwater wrote: post #150
macNchz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working on various teams operating on infrastructure that ranged from a rack in the back of the office, a few beefy servers in a colo, a fleet of Chef-managed VMs, GKE, ECS, and various PaaSes, what I've liked the most about the cloud and containerized workflows is that they wind up being a forcing function for reproducibility, at least to a degree. While it's absolutely 100% possible to have a "big beefy server arch…

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.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#177

Post by th0ma5 »

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…

You simply can't get the software or support for a lot of smaller solutions. It can be sometimes easier to do the seemingly more difficult thing, and sometimes because all the money goes to those more difficult seeming technical problems and solutions.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#178

Post by vanviegen »

simianwords wrote: post #156
gaoshan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Uh, no I don't in fact like dealing with any of that. And I've never had to in 20 years of managing some mid scale service on bare metal. (Though of course there have been issues of various sorts.)

I think you may have it backwards: people like tinkering with complex cloud stuff, even if they don't need it.

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