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

221–230 of 383 posts

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#221

Post by wilkommen »

acron0 wrote: post #4

Ugh, there is just something so satisfying about developer cynicism. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling. I basically agree with most of what the author is saying here, and I think that my feeling is that most developers are at least aware that they should resist technical self-pleasure in pursuit of making sure the business/product they're attached to is actually performing. Are there really people out there who st…

Yes, there are still people who start with microservices, unfortunately. There are where I work.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#222

Post by hombre_fatal »

huflungdung wrote: post #94
sgarland wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

What I say is that we massively underestimate just how fast computers are these days

On the other hand, there is a real crossroad that pops up that HNers tend to dismiss.

A common story is that since day one you just have lightweight app servers handling http requests doing 99% I/O. And your app servers can be deployed on a cheap box anywhere since they're just doing I/O. Maybe they're on Google Cloud Run or a small cluster of $5 VPS. You've built them so that they have zero deps on the machine they're running on.

But then one day you need to do some sort of computations.

One incremental option is to create a worker that can sit on a machine that can crunch the tasks and a pipeline to feed it. This can be seen as operationally complex compared to one machine, but it's also simple in other ways.

Another option is to do everything on one beefy server where your app servers just shell out the work on the same machine. This can be operationally simple in some ways, but not necessarily in all ways.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#223

Post by closeparen »

aiono wrote: post #220
closeparen wrote: post #219

>Modules cannot call each other, except through specific interfaces (for our Python monolith, we put those in a file called some_module/api.py, so other modules can do from some_module.api import some_function, SomeClass and call things that way. This is a solution to a large chunk of what people want out of microservices. There are just two problems, both of which feel tractable to a language/runtime that really wan…

> 1. If the code implementing the module API is private, it must all be colocated in one package. If it is public, then anyone can import it, breaking the module boundary. You need a visibility system that can say "this subtree of packages can cooperate with each other, but code outside the subtree can only use the top-level package." This is easily achieved in Scala with a particular use of package paths. You are al…

Unfortunately the thought pattern “modern software development is way too complex, we need something radically simpler… I know! I’ll use Scala!” is not a thing.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#224

Post by jrochkind1 »

> No, no you don’t, you can deploy your modules to their own repos and work on them that way, though then you lose the nice property of being able to atomically deploy changes across your entire codebase when an API changes.

That's not all you lose. You also lose being able to have a single git SHA to describe the state of the entire system at any time. And, lose the naturalness of running CI on the entire system at a given state (and knowing what CI ran on what state), although you can rig that up unnaturally of course.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#225

Post by darkwater »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #203
darkwater wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Yep. Low-effort, shallow knowledge, risk-taking guys.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#226

Post by hamburglar »

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…

I was part of a small team that built a $300M company on Ruby and MySQL that made every scaling mistake you can possibly make. This was also the right decision because it forced us to stay lean and focus on what we needed right now, as opposed to getting starry-eyed about what it was going to be like when we had 10 million users. At every order of magnitude, we had sudden emergencies where some new part of the system had become a bottleneck, and we scrambled like crazy to rearchitect things to accommodate. It was hard, and it was fun. And it was frugal. We eventually hit over 10 million users before I left, and I can’t say I regret the painful approach one bit.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#227

Post by theamk »

simianwords wrote: post #156
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.

While terraform is not ideal it is much much more easy to deal with managed services in AWS than to deal with on premises baremetal servers. Most are biased because they like dealing with the kind of issues in on premises. They like dealing with the performance regressions, heat maps, kernel issues etc. Because why not? You are a developer and you need some way to exercise your skills. AWS takes that away and makes y…

> performance regressions, heat maps, kernel issues etc.

> AWS takes that away and makes you focus on the product.

ha ha ha no. Have been dealing with kernel issues on my AWS machines for a long time. They lock up under certain kinds of high load. AWS support is useless. Experimenting with kernel version leads to performance regressions.

AWS is great if your IT/purchasing department is inefficient. Getting a new AWS machine is instant, compared to getting purchasing to approve new machine and IT allocating it to you. But all the low-level stuff is still there.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#228

Post by esafak »

strken wrote: post #41
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…

I've seen senior engineers get fired and the business suffer a setback because they didn't have any way to scale beyond a single low spec VPS from a budget provider, and their system crashed when a hall full of students tried to sign up together during a demo and each triggered 200ms of bcrypt CPU activity.

I will never forget the time my university's home-grown Web-based registration system crashed at the beginning of the semester, and the entirety of the university's student body had to form a line in order to have their registration entered manually. I waited a whole day, and they did not get round to me by night, so I had to wait the next day too.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#229

Post by n_u »

mannyv wrote: post #163

Actually, scalability is cheap. Our AWS bill until recently was around $160-$200 a month. To get the level of HA and performance would require at least 20 boxes in two data centers. Dev/test/prod with an HA db and a backend that never dies. I’ve built those on bare iron and they’re expensive. If you’re going for saas and customers that don’t care about your infrastructure then a hetzner box is fine. But really, creat…

Could you explain this some more? How are your costs so low in comparison? Are you using serverless?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#230

Post by liampulles »

Early in my career I was given the opportunity (in between consulting jobs) to make an MVP for a revamp of our internal employee management system.

I seized the opportunity to deploy my own Kubernetes cluster, and create a sidecar to help with user authentication (because of course we'd need a common way to do this for the multi-language suite of microservices we'd be building). I used up pretty much the entirety of my time designing and architecting how this colossus was going to work, and by the end I realized how foolish the whole endeavor was.

That was really an instructive failure - at my next job, I got everyone behind turning our team's microservices back into a modular monolith, and it worked very well.

Post reply on HN