Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is everything so scalable?

stavros.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 383 posts

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#21

Post by floating-io »

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…

For how many users, and at what transaction rate?

Not disagreeing that you can do a lot on a lot less than in the old days, but your story would be much more impactful with that information. :)

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#22

Post by lambdaone »

I had a client with a system just like this. EBS, S3, RDS, Cognito, the lot. It cost $00s per month under almost no load, and was a maintenance nightmare - which was the real problem, not the cost, as it stopped working altogether eventually. A bit of hacking later, it all fits on a single VM that costs ~$10/month to run and is far easier to build, deploy and maintain.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#23

Post by dapperdrake »

radarsat1 wrote: post #2

> scalability needs a whole bunch of complexity I am not sure this is true. Complexity is a function of architecture. Scalability can be achieved by abstraction, it doesn't necessarily imply highly coupled architecture, in fact scalability benefits from decoupling as much as possible, which effectively reduces complexity. If you have a simple job to do that fits in an AWS Lambda, why not deploy it that way, scalabili…

The complexity that makes money is all the essential complexity of the problem domain. The "complexity in the architecture" can only add to that (and often does).

This is the part that is about math as a language for patterns as well as research for finding counter-examples. It’s not an engineering problem yet.

Once you have product market fit, then it becomes and engineering problem.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#24

Post by saidinesh5 »

radarsat1 wrote: post #2

> scalability needs a whole bunch of complexity I am not sure this is true. Complexity is a function of architecture. Scalability can be achieved by abstraction, it doesn't necessarily imply highly coupled architecture, in fact scalability benefits from decoupling as much as possible, which effectively reduces complexity. If you have a simple job to do that fits in an AWS Lambda, why not deploy it that way, scalabili…

> If you have a simple job to do that fits in an AWS Lambda, why not deploy it that way, scalability is essentially free. But the real advantage is that by writing it as a Lambda you are forced to think of it in stateless terms.

What you are describing is already the example of premature optimization. The moment you are thinking of a job in terms of "fits in an AWS Lambda" you are automatically stuck with "Use S3 to store the results" and "use a queue to manage the jobs" decisions.

You don't even know if that job is the bottleneck that needs to scale. For all you know, writing a simple monolithic script to deploy onto a VM/server would be a lot simpler deployment. Just use the ram/filesystem as the cache. Write the results to the filesystem/database. When the time comes to scale you know exactly which parts of your monolith are the bottleneck that need to be split. For all you know - you can simply replicate your monolith, shard the inputs and the scaling is already done. Or just use the DB's replication functionality.

To put things into perspective, even a cheap raspberry pi/entry level cloud VM gives you thousands of postgres queries per second. Most startups I worked at NEVER hit that number. Yet their deployment stories started off with "let's use lambdas, s3, etc..". That's just added complexity. And a lot of bills - if it weren't for the "free cloud credits".

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#25

Post by 97nomad »

blueflow wrote: post #19
llm_nerd wrote: post #16

This piece is written with a pretty cliche dismissive tone that assumes that everything everyone else does is driven by cargo-culting if not outright ignorance. That people make these choices because they're just rushing to chase the latest trend. They're just trying to be cool, you see. Here's the thing, though: Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability. These two patterns are effective…

> Here's the thing, though: Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability. How is that supposed to happen. Without k8 involved somehow?

There is a lot of instruments, that don't need k8s to be scalable and reliable. Starting from stateless services and simple load balancers and ending with actor systems like in Erlang or Akka.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#26

Post by drob518 »

> 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”, but that’s a hard problem, whereas scalability is trivially solvable by reading a few engineering blogs, and anyway it’s not like anyone will ever call you out on it, since you’ll go bust in two months.

I laughed. I cried. Having a back full of microservices scars, I can attest that everything said here is true. Just build an effin monolith and get it done.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#27

Post by DrScientist »

Isn't it simple as the following?

Break your code into modules/components that have a defined interface between them. That interface only passes data - not code with behaviour - and signal the method calls may fail to complete ( ie throw exceptions ).

ie the interface could be a network call in the future.

Allow easy swapping of interface implementations by passing them into constructors/ using factories or dependency injection frameworks if you must.

That's it - you can then start with everything in-process and the rapid development that allows, but if you need to you can add splitting into networked microservices - any complexity that arises from the network aspect is hidden behind the proxy, with the ultimate escape hatch of the exception.

Have I missed something?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#28

Post by drob518 »

the8472 wrote: post #17
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…

1000TPS isn't that much? Engineer for low latency and with a 10ms budget that'd be 10 cores if it were CPU-bound, less in practice since usually part of the time is spent in IO wait.

And with CPUs now being shipped with 100+ cores, you can brute force that sucker a long way.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#29

Post by BirAdam »

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 PHP servers in front of a MySQL database that had one primary r/w with one read only replica. Storage (at that time) was usually done with glusterfs. This was scalable enough at the time for hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, though the video quality was quite a bit lower than what people expect today.

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.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#30

Post by crazygringo »

DrScientist wrote: post #27

Isn't it simple as the following? Break your code into modules/components that have a defined interface between them. That interface only passes data - not code with behaviour - and signal the method calls may fail to complete ( ie throw exceptions ). ie the interface could be a network call in the future. Allow easy swapping of interface implementations by passing them into constructors/ using factories or dependenc…

You're not missing much, but I don't understand why you're just basically repeating what the article already says. Except the article also says to use a monorepo.
Post reply on HN