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Why is everything so scalable?

stavros.io

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#201

Post by hrimfaxi »

wongarsu wrote: post #186
hrimfaxi wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any different from cloud? This whole thread was a response to > 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. suggesting to use a few beefy servers but if we are renting them from cloud we're back where we started.

The difference from the big clouds is that an equivalent instance at AWS costs 10x as much. If you go with few beefy servers AWS offers very little value for the money they charge, they only make sense for "cloud native" architectures. But if you rent raw servers from traditional hosters you can get prices much closer to the amortized costs of running them yourself, with the added convenience of having them in a cert…

For me the comparison was not against the specific instance of AWS but cloud in general, and AWS was a for instance. Which was the whole reason why I brought up compliance and stuff—it is much cheaper to have someone else handle that for you (even if it is hetzner!). That was my whole point.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#202

Post by stavros »

dt3ft wrote: post #183

Because Microsoft, Google and Amazon, to name a few, sell the story of the cloud to decision makers who can sign a subscription contract. Developers go with the flow, not daring to question the setup. Meanwhile, they host their own servers on a r-pi and ship sideprojects. Devs are not at fault here. It’s the management.

Having been on both sides, nope, it's 100% the devs pushing for this. I've had innumerable discussions trying to convince developers to simplify things, but their reaction was basically "how can we go against best practice?! Unthinkable!". It was a huge uphill battle.

Meanwhile, management didn't have an opinion, it was up to the teams to architect things how they liked, and they liked sprawling microservice everything, because they wanted to own 100% of their code, any other concern be damned.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#203

Post by galaxyLogic »

darkwater wrote: post #149
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.

Those are the ones that also usually tell you you can just stitch together a few SaaS products and it's magic.

It's much the same mindset as: "Vibe-coding can do it for you so you don't have to program"

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#204

Post by bcrosby95 »

xg15 wrote: post #196

> 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'?

Because how the devs decide to build the system influences whether you will have enough money to not go bust in two months.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#205

Post by arthurofbabylon »

I agree, of course. Choose an architecture for the pragmatic reality, not some fantastical non-reality.

However, I appreciate the craft. Some of these unnecessary optimizations (rather, “introduced complexities”) are vestigial accoutrements that come alongside generally good software design. Not all, but some. So I tolerate a fair amount of fanciness in myself and others when it coincides with solid intent and healthy output.

That said, we should absolutely not tolerate the presence of appurtenances of complexity at the architectural layer – that is a place reserved for pure 100% pragmatism.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#207

Post by apf6 »

Havoc wrote: post #54

Comes down to knowing when to stop. You don’t really want to DIY your own orchestrator etc. So better off just using kubernetes. But then not going too far down that rabbit hole. ie yes kubernetes but the simplest vanilla version of it you can manage

Simplest version of Kubernetes is zero Kubernetes. You can instead run your service using a process manager like PM2 or similar. I think even using Docker is overkill for a lot of small teams.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#209

Post by koito17 »

In 2015, a single server with 40 cores and 128 GB of RAM was able to handle 2 million WebSocket connections running an Elixir program[0].

One of my hot takes is that a gaming PC has fast enough hardware to serve thousands of clients with a static Rust binary and SQLite. Pair with Litestream, and you have easy-to-test, continuous backups. It's nice being able to test backups by just running `litestream restore` and then running a single binary on my development machine. Addtionally, when the backend is a single static binary, you gain the opportunity to test the entire system in CI without maintaining an ad-hoc cloud environment or heirarchy of mock services.

The points of contention, for me personally, would be managing deployments and observability.

Of course, at my workplace, I wouldn't dare to suggest this kind of architecture, but as others have mentioned, a single machine can go a long way, and I doubt most my projects will ever need to scale beyond 40 cores and 128 GB of RAM.

[0] https://x.com/chris_mccord/status/659430661942550528

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#210

Post by deadbabe »

Unfortunately software engineering suffers from the opposite problem of many other engineering disciplines.

Any idiot could build a bridge by just overbuilding everything, an engineer helps you build the minimum viable bridge.

In software, it’s the opposite. Idiots can easily roll out products and services with crude and basic code. You only need true engineers for the high volume high performance stuff. And if that’s not what you’re doing – you don’t need engineers. The logical conclusion is then to fire them.

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