Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 120 posts

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#31

Post by asalahli »

quanticle wrote: post #22
borland wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diagram 1 has the comment "What I think it should be". It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look like". It's amazing how much performance and scalability you can get out of computers, if you don't burden them with 100x overhead caused by shoveling data between mic…

It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look like". That's not a better interpretation. It says something (something not good) about the mindset of modern software engineers that the first thing they think of when they look at a website like StackOverflow is a n-laye…

It is absolutely a better interpretation. The former signals arrogance while the latter shows that OP accepts the inferiority of their guess in comparison to the actual architecture.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#32

Post by lifeisstillgood »

The main takeaway is that the questions searched for are so widely distributed that there is no need for a cache layer - they are nothing but long tail.

At that point there is no 'cloud' design that can help. Its either one database (or maybe just shard everything onto thousands of distributed nodes)

But the point I am trying to make is that kubernetes and microservices etc are based on idea of winners - power laws. One tweet everyone wants to read. One search term, one viral video.

Then again. This is just a question of taste - the taste of the dev lead. What (s)he feels is best approach. Take another company doing the same thing and different approach might emerge.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#33

Post by mupuff1234 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #16

Microservices remains mostly an organisational pattern to scale development teams not necessarily the system performance. Microservices add a lot of complexity and overhead.

"Normal" sized services should be adequate enough for that purpose.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#34

Post by threeseed »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #33
PaulKeeble wrote: post #16

Microservices remains mostly an organisational pattern to scale development teams not necessarily the system performance. Microservices add a lot of complexity and overhead.

"Normal" sized services should be adequate enough for that purpose.

Microservices became a synonym for Services Orientated Architecture years ago.

It's almost always relatively normal sized services split by functional area e.g. Auth, Cache etc.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#35

Post by prng2021 »

cntainer wrote: post #21

Imagine trying to present this kind of architecture to a room full of executives already sold on the "benefits" of kubernetes, big data, serverless, etc.

Hah. I get your point but it would be an easy sell for them. The impossible sell would be to engineers. Executives would just compare operating costs estimates.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#36

Post by threeseed »

cntainer wrote: post #21

Imagine trying to present this kind of architecture to a room full of executives already sold on the "benefits" of kubernetes, big data, serverless, etc.

The use case is simple i.e. web front end, thin app layer, database.

So if you were to implement this same architecture using Kubernetes or Serverless it would be as equally simple as a bunch of Ansible or Puppet scripts.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#37

Post by threeseed »

quanticle wrote: post #22
borland wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diagram 1 has the comment "What I think it should be". It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look like". It's amazing how much performance and scalability you can get out of computers, if you don't burden them with 100x overhead caused by shoveling data between mic…

It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look like". That's not a better interpretation. It says something (something not good) about the mindset of modern software engineers that the first thing they think of when they look at a website like StackOverflow is a n-laye…

This comment also says something.

You've taken the opinion of one engineer and used it to denigrate the mindset of all modern (young ?) software engineers.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#38

Post by guywhocodes »

threeseed wrote: post #34
mupuff1234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Normal" sized services should be adequate enough for that purpose.

Microservices became a synonym for Services Orientated Architecture years ago. It's almost always relatively normal sized services split by functional area e.g. Auth, Cache etc.

When concept X becomes hot as an alternative to Y, everyone absolutely have to do X or be square. But for large enough companies it's cheaper to influence the industry so that X = Y and we relegate Y to Y', where Y' only contains our bad memories of Y.

This is the "Enterprise Technology Adaptation Strategy".

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#40

Post by ilyt »

didntreadarticl wrote: post #29
kichik wrote: post #24

Is there a website that tracks outages of other websites like Stack Overflow over years? I know some that tell you if it's down right now, but not over years. I have a subjective feeling that Stack Overflow is down a lot more than other websites. I don't see that ever mentioned in the discussion of cloud vs on-prem which makes the discussion seem lacking.

http://stats.pingdom.com/w2oc4thvox7s/73676/history

With a caveat that pingdom will mark "a connection from pingdom server from other side of the world to the server" as downtime, even if the target and your ISP, and the ISP of your ISP had no problems.
Post reply on HN