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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#311

Post by thelastgallon »

Everything is scalable because for an enterprising executive/manager/employee the most important thing they are trying to solve is scaling their empire. Pay is based on how many reports you have and how big is your budget. Instead of 2 x 20K beefy servers, you get to spend tens or hundreds of million on cloud spend, then dozens of $500K/year SRE/DevOps/Cloud 'experts' running multi-cloud hybrid running kubernetes thingies. There will be SO many internal automation tools and big bonuses for developing those tools (wins all around), yet more and more hiring!

Once other executives understand that you can scale your team massively, they will hire you to scale even greater heights! More #winning!

There is a human element of everything and perverse incentives. Understanding these explains most things that seem baffling at first.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#312

Post by baxtr »

vidarh wrote: post #241
sgarland wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

I do consulting in this space, and I'm torn: I make much more money managing infrastructure from clients who insist on AWS. But it's much more enjoyable to work with people who knows how to keep it simple.

What I’ve always found concerning about managed cases is that the “platform” teams could never explain, in simple terms, how the application was actually deployed.

It was so complex I gave up after a while. That’s never a good sign.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#313

Post by cindyllm »

thelastgallon wrote: post #311

Everything is scalable because for an enterprising executive/manager/employee the most important thing they are trying to solve is scaling their empire. Pay is based on how many reports you have and how big is your budget. Instead of 2 x 20K beefy servers, you get to spend tens or hundreds of million on cloud spend, then dozens of $500K/year SRE/DevOps/Cloud 'experts' running multi-cloud hybrid running kubernetes thi…

[dead]

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#314

Post by christophilus »

Aeolun wrote: post #289
coder543 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have wished for years that Hetzner would offer their bare metal servers in the U.S., and not just Hetzner Cloud.

Here is US Hetzner: https://ioflood.com/ Their prices have come down a lot. I used them when the servers still cost $200 a piece, but their support at the time was fantastic.

Wow. No joke. I haven’t heard of them, but I like their blurb, and those are Hetzner like prices. Now, I just need to find a use for that much beef.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#315

Post by citizenpaul »

sgarland wrote: post #47
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

The problem with onsite or colo is always the same. You have to keep fighting the same battle again and again and again. In 5 years when the servers need replaced even though you have already proven it saves orders of magnitude in costs.

I've never once been rewarded for saving 100k+ a month even though I have done exactly that. I have been punished by having to constantly re justify the decision though. I just don't care anymore. I let the "BIG BRAIN MBA's" go ahead and set money on fire in the cloud. It's easier for me. Now I get to hire a team of "cloud architects" to do the infra. At eye bleeding cost increases for a system that will never ever see more than a few thousand users.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#316

Post by bunderbunder »

xmprt wrote: post #298
yoyohello13 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a project for my company (a low volume basic web app) and I suggested we could just start the whole thing on one server. They brought on some Azure consultants and the project ballooned out to months of work and all kinds of services. I’m convinced most of the consultants were just piling on services so they could make more money.

If you hire hammer experts then you're going to end up using a lot of hammers in your construction. The Azure experts aren't pitching Azure because they're trying to sell more Azure products. They do it because that's all they know and most likely because you don't know it so you'll be likely to come back to them for support when things inevitably need to evolve.

Also, the more you use your cloud vendor's various services in your code, the more subject you are to vendor lock-in.

I won't name any names, but I'm pretty sure this is a big part of the reason why a specific cloud vendor pushed so very hard for us to push a bunch of data into their highly advanced NoSQL big data solution, when the data in question was perfectly happy continuing indefinitely to exist as a few tens of megabytes of CSV files that were growing at a rate of a couple kilobytes per day.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#317

Post by adamcharnock »

sgarland wrote: post #47
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

I totally agree. So much complexity for generally no good reason [0]. I saw so much of this that I ended up starting a company doing the exact opposite. I figured I could do it better and cheaper, so that that's now what we do!

If anyone wants to bail out of AWS et al and onto a few beefy servers, save some money, and gain a DevOps team in the process, then drop us an email (adam at domain in bio).

[0] My pet theory about the real reason: the hyper-scalers hire all the engineers who have the skills to deploy-to-a-few-beefy-servers, and then charge a 10x multiplier for compute. Companies can then choose between impossible hiring, or paying more. Paying more is easier to stomach, and plenty of rationalisations are available.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#318

Post by roncesvalles »

thelastgallon wrote: post #311

Everything is scalable because for an enterprising executive/manager/employee the most important thing they are trying to solve is scaling their empire. Pay is based on how many reports you have and how big is your budget. Instead of 2 x 20K beefy servers, you get to spend tens or hundreds of million on cloud spend, then dozens of $500K/year SRE/DevOps/Cloud 'experts' running multi-cloud hybrid running kubernetes thi…

Exactly. Once you become a people manager, the only metric that matters in your career is "number of people below you".

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#319

Post by maxamillion »

I love this blog post so much. Stop solving problems you don't have. You have no users, you don't need to support a million of them. You make no money, you don't need to burn through all your cloud credits so fast. Just chill, start with a couple Linodes, Droplets, or Lightsail instances and see how far you can get with a simple app, api, load balancer, and a database. You'd be shocked how far that stretches when you're talking about servicing real paying customers.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#320

Post by roncesvalles »

Animats wrote: post #262

You can get an awful lot done with Go, MySQL or MariaDB, FCGI, Apache or Ngnix. You start with one server on shared hosting for a few dollars a month. Then scale up to a dedicated server, if the load appears. Then scale up to multiple servers with a load balancer. Replicate the database. On the load side, if you're accumulating "statistics" about user behavior, do you really need them for every user? Maybe only one u…

The problem with a VPS/baremetal solution is always high availability. Once you introduce HA, you may as well go into the cloud since HA'ing stateful stuff using VPS is a major pain.

Also, you can get a lot done with a serverless (FaaS/PaaS) solution and a simple DB like DynamoDB.

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