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What the hell have you built

wthhyb.sacha.house

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Re: What the hell have you built

#231

Post by embedding-shape »

benterix wrote: post #217
embedding-shape wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using container orchestration is about reliability, zero-downtime deployments I think that's the first time I've heard any "techie" say we use containers because of reliability or zero-downtime deployments, those feel like they have nothing to do with each other, and we've been building reliable server-side software with zero-downtime deployments long before containers became the "go-to", and if anything it was eas…

It would be interesting to hear your story, mine is that containers in general start an order of magnitude faster than vms (in general! we can easily find edge cases) and hence e.g. horizontal scaling is faster. You say it was easier before containers, I say k8s in spite of its complexity is a huge blessing as teams can upgrade their own parts independently and do things like canary releases easily with automated rol…

In general, my experience is "the more moving parts == less reliable", if I were to generalize across two decades of running web services. The most reliable platforms I've helped manage has been platforms that tried to avoid adding extra complexity until they really couldn't avoid it, and when I left still deployed applications by copy a built binary to a Linux host, reload the systemd service, switch the port in the proxy and let traffic hit the new service while healtchecking, and when green, switch over and stop the old service.

Deploys usually took minutes (unless something was broken), scaling worked the same as if you were using anything else, increase a number and redeploy, and no Kubernetes, Docker or even containers as far as the eye could see.

Re: What the hell have you built

#232

Post by mb2100 »

kiesel wrote: post #51

I love the fact that the author "wrote" this page with massive CSS framework (tailwind) and some sort of Javascript framework, with a bundler and obfuscator - instead of a plain, simple HTML page. Well played! :-)

haha, right?! I'm totally onboard with the author's philosophy, hence for websites: https://mastrojs.github.io – the simple web framework and site generator you could have built yourself.

Re: What the hell have you built

#233

Post by ericzundel »

I'm going through this decision right now. I agree, you are building a product with an unproven market and lots of time to grow organically, maybe you do want to start small and scrappy. Build something you can easily throw away and start over with. Build something that gets you to market as quickly as possible so you can pivot.

OTOH, If you are trying to sell the idea to investors and large companies that you are a serious player and have a plan and know-how to grow and scale your service quickly, maybe you do want to show that you have the design chops and ability to actually scale your product. Take a look and ask yourself, "Does my business model only work if it scales up dramatically, far beyond the capacity of a single database?" If the answer is "yes", start with a scalable architecture to save the 100+ person-years and endless gnashing of teeth it will take to untangle your monolith (been there.)

Re: What the hell have you built

#235

Post by whstl »

LandR wrote: post #107
whstl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really for "fun"? Or is it to satisfy the ideals of some CTO/VPE disconnected from the real world that wants architecture to be done a certain way? I still remember doing systems design interviews a few years ago when microservices were in vogue, and my routine was probing if they were ok with a simpler monolith or if they wanted to go crazy on cloud-native, serverless and microservices shizzle. It did backfire…

I worked for a company once where the CEO said I need to start using Kubernetes. Why? We didn't really have any pressing use cases / issues that were shouting out for Kubernetes at all. His reasoning was all the big players use it, so we should be too... It was literally a solution looking for a problem. Which is completely arse backwards.

I had the same situation happening with Cloud Native.

EC2 was forbidden, it had to be ECS or EKS if Lambda was not possible.

We did the math and the AWS bill had the cost of about 15 developers.

Re: What the hell have you built

#236

Post by yencabulator »

vlovich123 wrote: post #35
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #23

"Maybe Redis for caching". Really that's going way too far - you do NOT need Redis for caching. Just put it in Postgres. Why go to this much trouble to put people in their place for over engineering then concede "maybe Redis for caching" when this is absolutely something you can do in Postgres. The author clearly cannot stop their own inner desire for overengineering.

Postgres has support for an eventually consistent in-memory caching layer?

Why would it need to be eventually consistent when it's a single server?

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/sql-createtable.html#SQL-...

Re: What the hell have you built

#237

Post by arbol »

saulpw wrote: post #223
arbol wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at this stage. We have a good product with a solid architecture but only a few paying clients due to a complete lack of marketing. So I'm now doing the unfun things!

If you have had zero marketing, how do you know what you have is a good product?

Because we have a few paying clients who seem pretty happy. We have upsold to some clients and have a couple more leads in the pipeline. We are good at stopping bots and we have managed to block most solvers, which puts us (temporarily) ahead of some very big players in the bot mitigation sector.

If we can do this with nearly zero marketing, it stands to reason that some well thought out marketing would probably work.

Re: What the hell have you built

#238

Post by ExpertAdvisor01 »

arbol wrote: post #130
ratsimihah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first 5 years or so of solo bootstrapping were this. Then you learn that if you want to make money you have to prioritise the right things and not the fun things.

I'm at this stage. We have a good product with a solid architecture but only a few paying clients due to a complete lack of marketing. So I'm now doing the unfun things!

Not really . Even Cloudflares free bot detection is better .

Re: What the hell have you built

#239

Post by kragen »

cluckindan wrote: post #229
kragen wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TOCTOU bugs are a subset of cache invalidation bugs.

Are they really? TOCTOU is a trigger for race conditions, but I guess the result of the check is a cached value. Then again, the issue in TOCTOU is that the ”cached value” is not invalidated at all, or inadequately. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the invalidation mechanism, it is downstream from it.

I think it's sort of subjective. The fact that the invalidation mechanism doesn't extend further downstream is a problem with it, from my point of view, but maybe not yours. It's difficult to provide indisputable proofs of such value judgments.
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