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Use One Big Server (2022)
21–30 of 330 posts
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#22Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319147
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#23Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then…
For anything up to about 128GB RAM you can still easily avoid capex by just renting servers. Above that it gets a bit trickier
Renting (hosted) servers above 128GB RAM is still pretty easy, but I agree pricing levels out. 128GB RAM server ~$200/Month, 384 GB ~$580, 1024 GB ~$940/Month
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#24The problem is sizing and consistency. When you're small, it's not cost effective to overprovision 2-3 big servers (for HA).
And when you need to move fast (or things break), you can't wait a day for a dedicated server to come up, or worse, have your provider run out of capacity (or have to pick a different specced server)
IME, having to go multi cloud/provider is a way worse problem to have.
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#25The problem is sizing and consistency. When you're small, it's not cost effective to overprovision 2-3 big servers (for HA). And when you need to move fast (or things break), you can't wait a day for a dedicated server to come up, or worse, have your provider run out of capacity (or have to pick a different specced server) IME, having to go multi cloud/provider is a way worse problem to have.
There are a number of providers who provision dedicated servers via API in minutes these days. Given a dedicated server starts at around $90/Month it probably does make sense for alot of people.
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#26One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider.
Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago.
At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstate how far apart these machines are in raw computational capacity.
There are approaches to problems that make sense with 10x the capacity that don't make sense on the much smaller node. Critically, those approaches can sometimes save engineering time that would otherwise go into building a more complex system to manage around artificial constraints.
Yes, there are other factors like durability etc. that need to be designed for. But going the other way, dedicated boxes can deliver more consistent performance without worries of noisy neighbors.
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#27I did this (well, a large-r VPS for $120/month) for my Rails-based sports streaming website. I had a significant amount of throughput too, especially at peak (6-10pm ET).
My biggest takeaway was to have my core database tables (user, subscription, etc) backed up every 10 minutes, and the rest every hour, and test their restoration. (When I shut down the site it was 1.2TB.) Having a script to quickly provision a new node—in case I ever needed it—would have something up within 8 minutes from hitting enter.
When I compare this to the startups I’ve consulted for, who choose k8s because it’s what Google uses yet they only push out 1000s of database queries per day with a handful of background jobs and still try to optimize burn, I shake my head.
I’d do it again. Like many of us I don’t have the need for higher-complexity setups. When I did need to scale, I just added more vCPUs and RAM.
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#28Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then…
> and server hardware is expensive up front You don't need to buy server hardware(!), the article specifically mentions renting from eg Hetzner. > The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?
> Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?
I run a lambda behind a load balancer, hardware dies, its redundant, it gets replaced. I have a database server fail, while it re provisions it doesn't saturate read IO on the SAN causing noisy neighbor issues.
I don't deal with any of it, I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#29Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then…
For anything up to about 128GB RAM you can still easily avoid capex by just renting servers. Above that it gets a bit trickier
It's not like it's a huge capex for that level of server anyway. Probably less than the cost of one employee's laptop.
Re: Use One Big Server (2022)
#30and now consider 6th Gen EPYC will have 256 cores also you can have
32 hot-swap SSDs with like 10mil plus of random write IOPS and 60mil plus random read IOPS in a single 2U box