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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#41

Post by strken »

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…

I've seen senior engineers get fired and the business suffer a setback because they didn't have any way to scale beyond a single low spec VPS from a budget provider, and their system crashed when a hall full of students tried to sign up together during a demo and each triggered 200ms of bcrypt CPU activity.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#42

Post by JohnMakin »

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you do suddenly face scale and have to rip apart a legacy monolith that was built without scale in mind, you’ll chuckle at this article. It’s extremely painful.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#43

Post by okaleniuk »

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…

Yes, reliability comes from the same ground the scalability does, and yes people are mostly chasing the latest trend. One does not contradict the other.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#44

Post by aeyes »

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…

The architecture you describe is ok because in the end it is a fairly simple website. Little user interaction, limited amount of content (at most a few million records), few content changes per day. The most complex part is probably to have some kind of search engine but even with 10 million videos an ElasticSearch index is probably no larger than 1GB.

The only problem is that there is a lot of video data.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#45

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

strken wrote: post #41
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…

I've seen senior engineers get fired and the business suffer a setback because they didn't have any way to scale beyond a single low spec VPS from a budget provider, and their system crashed when a hall full of students tried to sign up together during a demo and each triggered 200ms of bcrypt CPU activity.

Wonder which one happens more often? Personally I haven't worked in that kind of "find the person to blame" culture which would led to something like that, so I haven't witnessed what you're talking about, but I believe you it does happen in some places.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#46

Post by llm_nerd »

crazygringo wrote: post #40
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…

>Empirically, that does not seem to be the case.

Failures are astonishingly, vanishingly rare. Like it's amazing at this point how reliable almost every system is. There are a tiny number of failures at enormous scale operations (almost always due to network misconfigurations, FWIW), but in the grand scheme of things we've architected an outrageously reliable set of platforms.

>That's not scaling, just redundancy.

In practice it almost always is scaling. No one wants to pay for a whole n server just to apply shipped logs to. I mean, the whole premise of this article is that you should get the most out of your spend, so in that case much better is two hot servers. And once you have two hot...why not four, distributed across data centers. And so on.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#47

Post by sgarland »

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 servers), but you absolutely need to configure and monitor your specific XaaS you’re renting.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#48

Post by crazygringo »

DrScientist wrote: post #36
crazygringo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good point! Sorry if I was being ungenerous.

I like the idea of the remote implementation being proxied -- not sure I've come across that pattern before.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#49

Post by llm_nerd »

okaleniuk wrote: post #43
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…

Yes, reliability comes from the same ground the scalability does, and yes people are mostly chasing the latest trend. One does not contradict the other.

>yes people are mostly chasing the latest trend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

15 years ago people were making the same "chasing trends" complaints. In that case there absolutely were people cargo culting, but to still be whining about this a decade and a half later, when it's quite literally just absolutely basic best practices.

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