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How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

blog.algomaster.io

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Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#21

Post by steveBK123 »

mbb70 wrote: post #17
Nextgrid wrote: post #15

Good post in general but some caveats: 1) His user numbers are off by an order of magnitude at least, as other comments have mentioned. Even a VM/VPS should handle more, and a modern bare-metal server will do way more than the quoted numbers. 2) Autoscaling is a solution to the self-inflicted problem of insanely-high cloud prices, which cloud providers love because implementing it requires more reliance on proprietar…

As is often stated, microservices is a solution for scaling an engineering org to 100s of developers, not for scaling a product to millions of users.

Unfortunately that message was way way behind the bombast of "microservices everywhere now" that preceded it for years, to the detriment of many small orgs.

I've seen engineering orgs of 10-50 launch headlong into microservices to poor results. No exaggeration to say many places ended up with more repos & services than developers to manage them.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#22

Post by tallytarik »

efilife wrote: post #20

This post shows some signs of having its parts written by a LLM in my opinion. Or am I crazy? Please tell me that I am. Author having this on his github makes me even more suspicious: https://github.com/ashishps1/learn-ai-engineering

It’s entirely written by an LLM.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#24

Post by yomismoaqui »

Nextgrid wrote: post #15

Good post in general but some caveats: 1) His user numbers are off by an order of magnitude at least, as other comments have mentioned. Even a VM/VPS should handle more, and a modern bare-metal server will do way more than the quoted numbers. 2) Autoscaling is a solution to the self-inflicted problem of insanely-high cloud prices, which cloud providers love because implementing it requires more reliance on proprietar…

The best descripcion of microservices comes from "The Grug Brained Developer" (https://grugbrain.dev/):

"grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

seem very confusing to grug"

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#25

Post by the8472 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #5

Not criticizing the core idea, which is sound (don't waste ressource overengineering at the beginning, evolve your architecture to match your actual scale as you grow), but the “number of users” figures in this post are completely nonsensical. You ought to multiply them by 100 (if you're being conservative) or even 1000 (depending on the consumption pattern for the user). Modern hardware is fast , if you cannot fit m…

Counting in users is just nonsensical. Is it total registered users? Users per ? Sessions that need to go in the session store? Concurrent requests?

Then there's the implementation language category. interpreted, JITed vs. AOT.

And of course the workload matters a lot. Simple CRUD application vs. compute-heavy or serving lots of media, ...

Together those factors can make like 6+ OOMs difference.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#26

Post by MikeNotThePope »

tallytarik wrote: post #22
efilife wrote: post #20

This post shows some signs of having its parts written by a LLM in my opinion. Or am I crazy? Please tell me that I am. Author having this on his github makes me even more suspicious: https://github.com/ashishps1/learn-ai-engineering

It’s entirely written by an LLM.

LOL, I was having an online chat with a friend the other day and commented I sound like an LLM.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#27

Post by efilife »

tallytarik wrote: post #22
efilife wrote: post #20

This post shows some signs of having its parts written by a LLM in my opinion. Or am I crazy? Please tell me that I am. Author having this on his github makes me even more suspicious: https://github.com/ashishps1/learn-ai-engineering

It’s entirely written by an LLM.

Are you sure?

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#28

Post by nika1975 »

maccard wrote: post #19
littlestymaar wrote: post #5

Not criticizing the core idea, which is sound (don't waste ressource overengineering at the beginning, evolve your architecture to match your actual scale as you grow), but the “number of users” figures in this post are completely nonsensical. You ought to multiply them by 100 (if you're being conservative) or even 1000 (depending on the consumption pattern for the user). Modern hardware is fast , if you cannot fit m…

You and another person made this point _but_ I’d encourage you to look at what $50/mo gets you on AWS all in. In reality it will get you a t4g.small plus 200GB of (very slow) storage. Honestly they start to chug at 500 or so users in my experience.

For this you avoid AWS, Azure and GCP. Their pricing is simply not competitive. We operate root servers at Hetzner serving dynamic content to six-figure audiences.

PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch clusters can be operated at a fraction of the cost of comparable managed services offered by the major cloud providers.

The idea that this necessarily involves excessive maintenance effort is nonsense.

The skills needed to use hyperscalers properly are better invested in fundamental sysadmin know-how.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#29

Post by tallytarik »

efilife wrote: post #27
tallytarik wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s entirely written by an LLM.

Are you sure?

Yes. The over-use of bold in the intro (hell, in the first sentence) is a good hint.

All of it aligns with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Maybe the images were made by hand.

Re: How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users

#30

Post by alemanek »

maccard wrote: post #19
littlestymaar wrote: post #5

Not criticizing the core idea, which is sound (don't waste ressource overengineering at the beginning, evolve your architecture to match your actual scale as you grow), but the “number of users” figures in this post are completely nonsensical. You ought to multiply them by 100 (if you're being conservative) or even 1000 (depending on the consumption pattern for the user). Modern hardware is fast , if you cannot fit m…

You and another person made this point _but_ I’d encourage you to look at what $50/mo gets you on AWS all in. In reality it will get you a t4g.small plus 200GB of (very slow) storage. Honestly they start to chug at 500 or so users in my experience.

If you look at what $50 a month gets you at OVH or Hetzner then their post makes more sense.

It isn’t an apples to apples comparison. But, you trade some additional operational overhead for a whole lot more hardware.

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