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Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

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Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#21

Can the majority of webapps run on a single machine? Probably. Do most of your customers expect close to 100% uptime? Yes. Does one machine provide the uptime required by your customers? Most definitely not.

Make it two machines then.

Ya. 1<n<6 has worked 99% of the time for me.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#23

Can the majority of webapps run on a single machine? Probably. Do most of your customers expect close to 100% uptime? Yes. Does one machine provide the uptime required by your customers? Most definitely not.

The correct answer to question 3 is "it depends".

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#24
post #3

A $5 VPS, with almost any app, can handle the front page of hacker news. If I remember correctly I'd even venture to say hacker news runs on a one or two core box. It should be the standard

Hacker News might not be the best example, as it seems to get overloaded once every week or two, usually when a contentious/high volume topic comes up.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#25

Can the majority of webapps run on a single machine? Probably. Do most of your customers expect close to 100% uptime? Yes. Does one machine provide the uptime required by your customers? Most definitely not.

Master slave failover will give you less than a second of downtime.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#26

Three machines get you availability that one machine can't.

That is not strictly true and entirely depends upon the machines in question.

True, I'm assuming commodity hardware. I've never had the privilege of working on really high end systems, but my impression is that you buy or lease a cluster in a box that is simulating one reliable computer.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#27
post #16
post #9

I can confirm. I've had quite a few projects that made it to the front page of HN and handled the traffic like cake. All of them ran on 5$ digital ocean droplets. I accept some projects are more resource expensive than others, but majority of the time you can get away with a bit of asynchronous responses + scheduler/queue to spread the load horizontally over time. Unpopular opinion: I blame the new age devops culture…

The problem with devops replacing the old title “sysadmin” was that the dev part dragged in the worst thing about developer culture: the love of complexity and the tendency to build massive towers of it. Sysadmins usually avoided complexity because their attitude toward it was more sensible: it’s expensive, fragile, and tends to actually multiply failure modes. I also blame cloud marketing. This stuff is a gigantic m…

If you guys don't see the value of being able to click on a button on a website to deploy, perfectly, everytime over some guy sshing into the box and running git pull I dunno what to tell you.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#28

Can the majority of webapps run on a single machine? Probably. Do most of your customers expect close to 100% uptime? Yes. Does one machine provide the uptime required by your customers? Most definitely not.

Well if you can spin up a new environment in less than a minute – does it matter? I mean if you are Facebook yes, but having worked with a lot of people building things like web shops – having a minute downtime I would say is fine because I've seen so many of these people shoot themself in the foot trying to build high-availability solutions and having constant downtimes just because they can't handle their own complexity.

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#29
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with devops replacing the old title “sysadmin” was that the dev part dragged in the worst thing about developer culture: the love of complexity and the tendency to build massive towers of it. Sysadmins usually avoided complexity because their attitude toward it was more sensible: it’s expensive, fragile, and tends to actually multiply failure modes. I also blame cloud marketing. This stuff is a gigantic m…

If you guys don't see the value of being able to click on a button on a website to deploy, perfectly, everytime over some guy sshing into the box and running git pull I dunno what to tell you.

Emacs has a button for that :-).

Re: Majority of web apps could just run on a single server

#30
post #12

Yes. You don't even need containers. Write your program as one Go executable and drive it from fcgi. Go is fast enough that you can get a lot of work done on a minimal server. Fgci provides "orchestration" of multiple processes, plus crash and restart handling. Also, there's much less attack surface. If your minimal Go program can only respond to specific requests, there's not the problem of an attacker targeting som…

Go can even serve traffic directly without a frontend server, ACME support for TLS is also great.
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