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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#191

Post by chamomeal »

sgarland wrote: post #47
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…

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…

Docker compose on a couple nice VPS’s can do a LOT

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#192

Post by JackSlateur »

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…

It is an issue to mistake scalability with resiliency

Yes, we can run twitter on a single server (https://thume.ca/2023/01/02/one-machine-twitter/) No, we do not want to run twitter on a single server

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#193

Post by JackSlateur »

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…

Is it about scalability, or about resiliency ?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#194

Post by danielmarkbruce »

pigcat wrote: post #83

My friend is the first dev hire at a startup where they prematurely overengineered for scalability. The technical founders had recently exited a previous startup and their rationale was that it makes a future acquisition easier, since a potential acquirer will weigh scalability in their evaluation of the code (and maybe even conflate it with quality). In fact it was a regret from their first startup that they hadn't…

Sure, if the acquirer thinks the product is going to sell a lot.

A relatively common plan (it doesn't always work) for large enterprise software companies is to buy a product and then use their very large sales force to sell it into all their existing customers. If thats the plan, you have to make sure the product will work with all the increased usage.

I'd still suggest it's far better to optimize for building the right product - the "is this going to scale" problem is one of the nicest problems you can face.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#195

Post by icedchai »

ndriscoll wrote: post #173
simianwords wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that building your backend on Lambda is terrible for many reasons: slow starts, request / response size restrictions, limitations in "layer" sizes, etc.

RDS, however, I have found to be rock solid. What have you run into?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#196

Post by xg15 »

> The first problem every startup solves is scalability. The first problem every startup should solve is “how do we have enough money to not go bust in two months”

Why is the second question the devs' responsibility? Shouldn't it be the founders'?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#197

Post by Groxx »

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…

You can solve just about any distributed systems problem by accepting latency, but nobody wants to accept latency :)

...despite the vast majority of latency issues being extremely low-hanging fruit, like "maybe don't have tens of megabytes of data required to do first paint on your website" or "hey maybe have an index in that database?".

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#198

Post by bcrosby95 »

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…

We have both AWS and colocated servers. The server workload mostly scales with the machine count not the user count. And you can get a lot done with very few servers these days.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#199

Post by patapong »

JackSlateur wrote: post #192
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…

It is an issue to mistake scalability with resiliency Yes, we can run twitter on a single server ( https://thume.ca/2023/01/02/one-machine-twitter/ ) No, we do not want to run twitter on a single server

I would argue that even resiliency is a metric that should not be overemphasized in early stages of development. I would rather have a system that suffers occasional outages than one that has perfect resiliency but has added complexity with tradeoffs in costs, complexity and thus development velocity. I think the risks of not being quick enough to product market fit in early stages is bigger than losing customers over short duration outages - except of course if the selling point is resiliency.

Of course this should not be overdone, but there is something to be said for single server + backup setups, and reweriting to scale + resiliency once traction has been established.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#200

Post by afiodorov »

I've found that building my side projects to be "scalable" is a practical side effect of choosing the most cost-effective hosting.

When a project has little to no traffic, the on-demand pricing of serverless is unbeatable. A static site on S3 or a backend on Lambda with DynamoDB will cost nothing under the AWS free tier. A dedicated server, even a cheap one, is an immediate and fixed $8-10/month liability.

The cost to run a monolith on a VPS only becomes competitive once you have enough users to burn through the very generous free tiers, which for many side projects is a long way off. The primary driver here is minimizing cost and operational overhead from day one.

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