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Why is everything so scalable?

stavros.io

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#371

Post by lunias »

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…

Preach. Architects need to get back to base principles, stop reading so many blog posts, start writing more code, and actually try things for themselves. Almost every system I work on is architecturally obese and while it "could scale" it has never and will realistically never need to. The first thing I'd do to claw back performance (and productivity) in most instances is make the system less distributed.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#372

Post by daxfohl »

hedora wrote: post #370
daxfohl wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the real advantage is that if you need to change it you don't have to deploy your monolith. Of course, the relative benefit of that is situationally dependent, but I was recently burned by a team that built a new replication handler we needed into their monolith, and every time it had a bug, and the monolith only got deployed once a week. I begged them to put it into a lambda but every week was "we'll get it…

That’s orthogonal to microservices. They could deploy the monolith multiple times a day. Of course, that’d require CI, which clearly wasn’t working well in your example.

Correct. It's orthogonal in an ideal world, but in a real world where there's tech debt and competing priorities, it can very much come into play.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#373

Post by Capricorn2481 »

gamerDude wrote: post #105

When I'm working with new developers I always have to convince them to simplify their setup. Why are we on autoscaled, pay by the query infra when we are serving a few people. Then they complain how expensive it is. I had someone tell me that their costs were $1500/mon when they were in demo stages. I asked them why they aren't hosting on a single small server for $20. And they responded that it didn't matter because…

I'm not totally following the cost analysis from some of these comments. I agree that there's no reason to make your architecture overly complicated, especially if it will cost dev time. I'm not saying this as someone that does cloud very much. We normally do a single server. More as an outsider looking in.

If you load balance 4 smaller ec2 instances vs a larger one, it's significantly cheaper. There is overhead when you run the same app on 4 machines, but not as much as people think. An idle system uses 300-600mb of ram, leaving roughly 3.5gb vram usable, per machine.

4 t3.medium instances are about $119/mo, vs. an equivalent t3.2xlarge which is $238/mo.

Also people will often say Digital Ocean is cheaper, but they compare it to non-equivalent AWS services. A Digital Ocean VPS compared to an equivalent EC2 is about the same.

So I understand when people argue about complicating architecture or optimizing prematurely, but I don't think the math on actual server cost really checks out. I would prefer to do dedicated hosting, but Hetzner doesn't have that in the U.S.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#374

Post by bunderbunder »

jiggawatts wrote: post #344
bunderbunder wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

CosmosDB? It’s okay, this is the Internet, you can name names.

Naming names would not be helpful. The problem isn't any one company's business practices. The problem isn't necessarily even vendor lock-in. The problem is familiarity bias. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And, as a corollary, when you ask a hammer vendor what you should do their answer will always be to treat your problems like nails.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#375

Post by hamburglar »

stavros wrote: post #325
hamburglar wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of a small team that built a $300M company on Ruby and MySQL that made every scaling mistake you can possibly make. This was also the right decision because it forced us to stay lean and focus on what we needed right now, as opposed to getting starry-eyed about what it was going to be like when we had 10 million users. At every order of magnitude, we had sudden emergencies where some new part of the system…

I also imagine you were pretty agile by not having tons of complexity to grapple with every time you wanted to add a new feature.

Haha, we were tech debt city. It certainly didn’t feel agile.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#376

Post by rixed »

alexchantavy wrote: post #256
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…

Around 5 years ago the metagame was to make everything horizontally scalable. Now it seems things are swinging back the other direction and articles like "Use One Big Server" are getting re-discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45085029

"La mode, c'est ce qui se démode" -- J Cocteau

("fashion is what goes out of fashion")

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#377

Post by Animats »

foldr wrote: post #337
roncesvalles wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't disagree with this, but I think people sometimes miss the fact that even cheap commodity hardware is way more reliable than most software. Your site may go down more often due to bugs in your HA configuration than it would have gone down because of your VPS dying once a year or so. If you are not a huge operation, the sweet spot for HA is probably something very simple (e.g. two servers behind a load balancer…

Two servers, load balancer, replicated Postgres database on the back end, offsite backups?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#378

Post by BobbyTables2 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #188
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have always felt the same. I’ve seen an entire company proudly proclaim a modern multicore Xeon with 32GB RAM can do basic monitoring tasks that should have been possible with little more than an Arduino. Except the 32GB Xeon was far too slow for their implementation...

How did they implement it? That's horrendous.

Java - but done so horribly even the devil would be aghast.

There were thousands of threads, murmuring an incessant hum fully occupying a few cores when absolutely nothing was happening. Over 20GB RAM actively used at idle.

I think booting the application took almost half an hour at one point, using a local SSD.

I’m fairly certain at no point in my career could I ever have replicated such a monstrosity.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#379

Post by deterministic »

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…

You are spot on. Most developers have no clue how powerful servers are nowadays.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#380

Post by DanielHB »

vidarh wrote: post #354
DanielHB wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing database backups myself is something that gives me nightmares. I would refuse to use bare-metal dbs unless I have a dedicated team just to manage the database (or data that is okay to lose, like caching layers).

Managing database backups is fairly straightforward. Postgres + a base backup + long term wal archiving in a blob store is very easy to set up and monitor. It could be easier , and if you don't want to manage that using RDS is certainly a valid choice, but it's a tradeoff - I often have customers that help addressing performance issues with RDS they simply wouldn't have if they sized a bare metal setup with enough RA…

I dunno, it does sound like significant work and way outside my (and most devs) area of expertise. I can definitely supervise a managed RDBMS (like RDS) by myself without help on the side even though I am no dba.

A mismanaged VPS is downtime and churn, a mismanaged DB will insta-kill your business if you have unrecoverable data loss. I would definitely use a managed solution until I can get a dedicated person to babysit the DB, but I would consider managing a VPS myself.

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