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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#241

Post by Esophagus4 »

t_mahmood wrote: post #184
runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole th…

Without understanding the architecture and use case better, at first read, my gut says that isn’t an AWS problem - it sounds like a solutions architecture problem.

There are cheaper ways of building that use case on AWS.

Most AWS sticker shock I’ve seen results from someone who doesn’t really understand cloud trying to build on the cloud. Cost has to be designed in from the start (in addition to security, operational overhead, etc).

In general, I’ve found two types of engineering teams who don’t use the cloud: the mugs and the superstars. And since superstars are few and far between, that means…

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#242

Post by Esophagus4 »

sevensor wrote: post #200
runako wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't see how "bare metal" saves any engineering time This is because you are looking only at provisioning/deployment. And you are right -- node size does not impact DevOps all that much. I am looking at the solution space available to the engineers who write the software that ultimately gets deployed on the nodes. And that solution space is different when the nodes have 10x the capability. Yes, cloud prov…

I’ve seen multiple projects founder on the complexity of writing software for the cloud. Moving data from here to there ends up being way harder than anybody expected. Maybe teams with more experience build this into their planning, but from what I’ve seen, if you’re using the cloud, your solution ends up being 95% about getting data where it’s supposed to be and 5% application logic.

This sounds a people problem, not a technology problem.

I’ve never had an issue with moving data.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#243

Post by d_burfoot »

dang wrote: post #48

HN uses two—one live and one backup, so we can fail over if there's a hardware issue or we need to upgrade something. It's a nice pattern. Just don't make them clones of each other, or they might go BLAM at the same time! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32032235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32028511 ( --- Edit: both these points are mentioned in the OP.

Any stats on HN downtime over the years? I remember one or two outages in the last decade or so, but I would guess the uptime is about 99.99%.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#244

Post by fragmede »

sahilagarwal wrote: post #233
shrubble wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying someone $2000 to set that up once should result in the costs being recovered in what, 18 months? If you’re running Postgres locally you can turn off the TCP/IP part; nothing more to audit there. SSH based copying of backups to a remote server is simple. If not accessible via network, you can stay on whatever version of Postgres you want. I’ve heard these arguments since AWS launched, and all that time I’ve bee…

I guess my non-management / non-business side is show here, but how can it be that much?? I still remember I designed a fairly simple cron job that took database backups when I was a junior developer. It gets even easier now that you have cheap s3 - just upload the dump to s3 every day and set the s3 deletion policy to whatever is feasible for you.

How much were you paid as a jr developer, and how long did it take you to set up? Then round up to mid-level developer, and add in hardware and software costs.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#245

Post by mr_toad »

t_mahmood wrote: post #184
runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole th…

Saving $75 a month at what cost in labour?

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#246

Post by bluedino »

benjiro wrote: post #211
runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

> At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. The problem that Hetzner and a lot of hardware providing hosts have, is the lack of affordable flexibility. Hetzner their design is based upon a base range of standardized products. This can only be upgraded within a pre-approved range of upgrade options (limited to storage/memory). Upgrades are often a mixed bag of carefully desi…

Almost reminds of Rackspace back in...2011

We had a leased server from them, running VMware, and we had Linux virtual machines for our application.

We ran out of RAM. We only had 16 or 32GB at the time. Hey, can we double this? Sure, but our payment would nearly double. How does that make any sense?

If this were a co-located box we owned, I could buy a pair of $125 chips from Crucial (or $250 Dell chips from CDW) and there we go. But we're expected to pay this much more per month?

Their answer was "you can do more with the server so that's what you're paying for"

Storage was a similar situation, we were still on RAID with spinning drives and we wanted to go SSD, not even NVME. Wasn't going to happen. And if we went to a new server we'd have to get all new IP's and stuff. Ugh.

And 10Gb...that was a pipe dream. Costs were insane.

We ended up having to decide between two things:

1. Move to a co-lo and buy a couple servers, ala StackExchange. This is what I wanted to do.

2. Tweak the current application stack, and re-write the next version to run on AWS.

What did we end up doing? Some half ass solution using the existing server for DB and NGINX proxy, while running the sites on (very slow) Slicehost instances (which Rackspace had recently acquired and roughly integrated into their network). So we still had downtime issues, slow databases, etc.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#247

Post by dijit »

fragmede wrote: post #244
sahilagarwal wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my non-management / non-business side is show here, but how can it be that much?? I still remember I designed a fairly simple cron job that took database backups when I was a junior developer. It gets even easier now that you have cheap s3 - just upload the dump to s3 every day and set the s3 deletion policy to whatever is feasible for you.

How much were you paid as a jr developer, and how long did it take you to set up? Then round up to mid-level developer, and add in hardware and software costs.

That's a deflection. The question isn't about a developer's salary; it's about the fundamental difference between a one-time investment and a permanent cost.

Either way: 1 day of a mid-level developer in the majority of the world (basically: anywhere except Zurich, NYC or SF) is between €208 and €291. (Yearly salary of €50-€70k)

A junior developer's time for setup and the cost of hardware is practically a one-off expense. It's a few days of work at most.

The alternative you're advocating for (a recurring SaaS fee) is a permanent rent trap. That money is gone forever, with no asset or investment to show for it. Over a few years, you'll have spent tens of thousands of dollars for nothing. The real cost is not what you pay a developer; it's what you lose by never owning your tools.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#248

Post by alemanek »

sahilagarwal wrote: post #233
shrubble wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying someone $2000 to set that up once should result in the costs being recovered in what, 18 months? If you’re running Postgres locally you can turn off the TCP/IP part; nothing more to audit there. SSH based copying of backups to a remote server is simple. If not accessible via network, you can stay on whatever version of Postgres you want. I’ve heard these arguments since AWS launched, and all that time I’ve bee…

I guess my non-management / non-business side is show here, but how can it be that much?? I still remember I designed a fairly simple cron job that took database backups when I was a junior developer. It gets even easier now that you have cheap s3 - just upload the dump to s3 every day and set the s3 deletion policy to whatever is feasible for you.

I am not an expert here but I am currently researching for a planned project.

For backups, including Postgres, I was planning on paying Veeam ~$500 a year for a software license to backup the active node and Postgres database to s3/r2. Standby node would be getting streaming updates via logical replication.

There are free options as well but I didn’t want to cheap out on the backups.

It looks pretty turnkey. I am a software engineer not a sysadmin though. Still just theory as well as I haven’t built it out yet

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#249

Post by winrid »

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #180

Being a big server proponent myself. Usually for one reason or the other there is need to introduce some socket style communication to the frontend and that becomes impossible in a single machine after a certain threshold. Is there something obvious that I'm missing?

I've had 100k+ users connected to mid range linode boxes. Do you have that many?

Even still at that point you just round robin to a set of big machines. Easy

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#250

Post by winrid »

matt-p wrote: post #25
turtlebits wrote: post #24

The problem is sizing and consistency. When you're small, it's not cost effective to overprovision 2-3 big servers (for HA). And when you need to move fast (or things break), you can't wait a day for a dedicated server to come up, or worse, have your provider run out of capacity (or have to pick a different specced server) IME, having to go multi cloud/provider is a way worse problem to have.

There are a number of providers who provision dedicated servers via API in minutes these days. Given a dedicated server starts at around $90/Month it probably does make sense for alot of people.

A $20 dedicated server from OVH can outperform $144 VPSs from Linode in my testing, on passmark.
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