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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#31

Post by gampleman »

Hilariously written but also too true.

One start up I worked at we had 2 Kubernetes clusters and a rat's nest of microservices for an internal tool that, had we been actually successful at delivering sufficient value would have been used by at most a 100 employees (and those would unlikely be concurrent). And this was an extremely highly valued company at the time.

Another place I worked at we were paying for 2 dev ops engineers (and those guys don't come cheap) to maintain our deployment cluster for 3 apps which each had a single customer (with a handful of users). This whole operation had like 20 people and an engineering team of 8.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#32

Post by andoando »

gampleman wrote: post #31

Hilariously written but also too true. One start up I worked at we had 2 Kubernetes clusters and a rat's nest of microservices for an internal tool that, had we been actually successful at delivering sufficient value would have been used by at most a 100 employees (and those would unlikely be concurrent). And this was an extremely highly valued company at the time. Another place I worked at we were paying for 2 dev o…

We have the same shit and its super annoying too cause in addition I cant do shit without going through the dev ops team even though were 5 engineers.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#33

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

the8472 wrote: post #17
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…

1000TPS isn't that much? Engineer for low latency and with a 10ms budget that'd be 10 cores if it were CPU-bound, less in practice since usually part of the time is spent in IO wait.

> 1000TPS isn't that much?

Why does that matter? My argument is: Engineer for what you know, leave the rest for when you know better, which isn't before you have lots of users.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#34

Post by drob518 »

jwr wrote: post #5

I don't get this scalability craze either. Computers are stupid fast these days and unless you are doing something silly, it's difficult to run into CPU speed limitations. I've been running a SaaS for 10 years now. Initially on a single server, after a couple of years moved to a distributed database (RethinkDB) and a 3-server setup, not for "scalability" but to get redundancy and prevent data loss. Haven't felt a nee…

One of the silliest things you can do to cripple your performance is build something that is artificially over distributed, injecting lots of network delays between components, all of which have to be transited to fulfill a single user request. Monoliths are fast. Yes, sometimes you absolutely have to break something into a standalone service, but that’s rare.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#35

Post by crazygringo »

jwr wrote: post #5

I don't get this scalability craze either. Computers are stupid fast these days and unless you are doing something silly, it's difficult to run into CPU speed limitations. I've been running a SaaS for 10 years now. Initially on a single server, after a couple of years moved to a distributed database (RethinkDB) and a 3-server setup, not for "scalability" but to get redundancy and prevent data loss. Haven't felt a nee…

Scalability isn't just about CPU.

It's just as much about storage and IO and memory and bandwidth.

Different types of sites have completely different resource profiles.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#36

Post by DrScientist »

crazygringo wrote: post #30
DrScientist wrote: post #27

Isn't it simple as the following? Break your code into modules/components that have a defined interface between them. That interface only passes data - not code with behaviour - and signal the method calls may fail to complete ( ie throw exceptions ). ie the interface could be a network call in the future. Allow easy swapping of interface implementations by passing them into constructors/ using factories or dependenc…

You're not missing much, but I don't understand why you're just basically repeating what the article already says. Except the article also says to use a monorepo.

I think I've added a couple of elements to make it possible to scale your auth service if you need to. Easily swappable implementations and making sure the interfaces advertise that calls may simply fail.

Even so it's still very simple.

To scale your auth service you just write a proxy to a remote implementation and pass that in - any load balancing etc is hidden behind that same interface and none of the rest of the code cares.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#37

Post by robertlagrant »

lpapez wrote: post #14
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…

> Are there really people out there who still reach for Meta-scale by default? Who start with microservices? Anecdotally, the last three greenfield projects I was a part of, the Architects (distinct people in every case) began the project along the lines of "let us define the microservices to handle our domains". Every one of those projects failed, in my opinion not primarily owing to bad technical decisions - but th…

I think this sounds more like Domain Driven Design than Clean Code.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#39

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

> 1000TPS and 10K daily users

That is not a lot. You can host that on a Raspberry Pi.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#40

Post by crazygringo »

llm_nerd wrote: post #16

This piece is written with a pretty cliche dismissive tone that assumes that everything everyone else does is driven by cargo-culting if not outright ignorance. That people make these choices because they're just rushing to chase the latest trend. They're just trying to be cool, you see. Here's the thing, though: Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability. These two patterns are effective…

> Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability.

Empirically, that does not seem to be the case. Large scalable systems also go offline for hours at a time. There are so many more potential points of failure due to the complexity.

And even with a single regular server, it's very easy to keep a live replica backup of the database and point to that if the main one goes down. Which is a common practice. That's not scaling, just redundancy.

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