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Why not a single FPGA with 100Gbps ethernet or pcie with NVM attached? Around $5K for the hardware and $5K for the traffic per month. The software would be a bit trickier to write, but you now get 100x performance for the same price
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kubernetes and containers are a means to service architecture; It enabled scalability but does not require it. You should still be containerizing your applications to ensure a consistent environment, even if you only throw it in a docker-compose file on your production server.
I don't even use containers - I aim primarily for simplicity and so far I have found I am able to build entire sophisticated systems without a single container. Containers I find make things much more complex.
But it's a pretty objective notation that manually scaled single machines don't scale as well as automation.
Good analysis. Obviously, this doesn't handle cases like redundancy and doesn't handle some of other critical workloads the company has. However, it does show how much real compute bloat these companies actually have - https://twitter.com/petrillic/status/1593686223717269504 where they use 24 million vcpus and spend 300 million a month on cloud.
I like this kind of exercise. One thing I am not seeing is analytics, logs and so forth that as I understand it are significant portions of Twitter's production cost story.
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
Indeed.
Lots of examples out there, one being Let's Encrypt[1] who run off one MySQL server (with a few read replicas but only one write).
[1] https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
I think you mean vertical, right?
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
> colo cost + total server cost/(3 year) => $18,471/year Meanwhile the company I just left was spending more than this for dozens of kubernetes clusters on AWS before signing a single customer. Sometimes I wonder what I'm still doing in this industry.
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
>… without understanding how much capacity there is in horizontal. I think you mean vertical, right?
However, I think the author critically under-guesses the sizes of things (even just for storage) by a reasonably substantial amount. e.g.: Quote tweets do not go against the size limit of the tweet field at Twitter. Likely they are embedding a tweet reference in some manner or other in place of the text of the quoted tweet itself but regardless a tweet takes up more than 280 unicode characters.
Also, nowhere in the article are hashtags mentioned. For a system like this to work you need some indexing of hashtags so you aren't doing a full scan of the entire tweet text of every tweet anytime someone decides to search for #YOLO. The system as proposed is missing a highly critical feature of the platform it purports to emulate. I have no insider knowledge but I suspect that index is maybe the second largest thing on disk on the entire platform, apart from the tweets themselves.