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If you really wanted to run Twitter on one machine at any cost, wouldn't an IBM mainframe be much more practical? You can even run Linux on them now. The specs he cites would actually be fairly small for a mainframe, which can reach up to 40TB of memory. I'm not saying this is a good idea, but it seems better than what the OP proposes.
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
> I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. Indeed. Lots of examples out there, one being Let's Encrypt[1] who run off one MySQL server (with a few read replicas but only one write). [1] https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...
Good analysis. Obviously, this doesn't handle cases like redundancy and doesn't handle some of other critical workloads the company has. However, it does show how much real compute bloat these companies actually have - https://twitter.com/petrillic/status/1593686223717269504 where they use 24 million vcpus and spend 300 million a month on cloud.
On the other hand, Twitter does (or did) handle over 450 million monthly active users (based on stats websites), with a target for 315 monetizable daily active users (based on their earnings calls pre-privatization). Handling that amount of concurrency and beaming millions of tweets a day to home feeds and notifications is going to be logistically hard.
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
It's very simple to make a PoC on a very powerful machine, make it ready from production serving hunderd of millions of users is completely different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system easy, likely the more reliable and easy to understand. What if your unique machine crash?
Well you gotta have a backup strategy. I'm talking about the primary machine here, I assumed that would be obvious but maybe not. You build your failover strategy into your architecture - there's lots of ways to do it - I use Postgres so I would favor something based around log shipping.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. Indeed. Lots of examples out there, one being Let's Encrypt[1] who run off one MySQL server (with a few read replicas but only one write). [1] https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...
That doesn't really seem like an example, since the whole thing doesn't run one machine. The database alone has multiple machines.
It is an example. It shows you how you can run a service that issues a few hundred million SSL certs a year off relatively few pieces of hardware, i.e. no need to go drinking the cloud Kool aid.
There will never be a "perfect" example. The overall point here is demonstrating that the first answer to everything doesn't have to include the word "cloud".
> The database alone has multiple machines.
As I said, and the blog says ... there is only one writer. The other nodes are smaller read replicas.
Which again shows you don't need to go with the cloud buzzword-filled database services.
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
Kubernetes and containers are a means to service architecture; It enabled scalability but does not require it. You should still be containerizing your applications to ensure a consistent environment, even if you only throw it in a docker-compose file on your production server.
I'll say that this is a good point, especially because if you don't use containers or a similar solution (even things like shipping VM images, for all I care), you'll end up with environment drift, unless your application is a statically compiled executable with no system dependencies, like a JDK/.NET/Python/Ruby runtime or worse yet, an application server like Tomcat, all of which can have different versions. Worse yet, if you need to install packages on the system, for which you haven't pinned specific versions (e.g. needing something that's installed through apt/yum, rather than package.json or Gemfile, or requirements.txt and so on).
That said, even when you don't use containers, you can still benefit from some pretty nice suggestions that will help make the software you develop easier to manage and run: https://12factor.net/
I'd also suggest that you have a single mechanism for managing everything that you need to run, so if it's not containers and an orchestrator of some sort, at least write systemd services or an equivalent for every process or group of processes that should be running.
Disclaimer: I still think that containers are a good idea, just because of how much of a dumpsterfire managing different OSes, their packages, language runtimes, application dependencies, application executables, port mappings, application resource limits, configuration, logging and other aspects is. Kubernetes, perhaps a bit less so, although when it works, it gets the job done... passably. Then again, Docker Swarm to me felt better for smaller deployments (a better fit for what you want to do vs the resources you have), whereas Nomad was also pretty nice, even if HCL sadly doesn't use the Docker Compose specification.
Why not a single FPGA with 100Gbps ethernet or pcie with NVM attached? Around $5K for the hardware and $5K for the traffic per month. The software would be a bit trickier to write, but you now get 100x performance for the same price
I think that this may make sense for some applications, but I also think that if you can utilize software abstractions to improve developer efficiency, it reduces risk in the long run.
Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions. I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical. The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system ea…
> The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system easy, likely the more reliable and easy to understand. What if your unique machine crash?
Why not a single FPGA with 100Gbps ethernet or pcie with NVM attached? Around $5K for the hardware and $5K for the traffic per month. The software would be a bit trickier to write, but you now get 100x performance for the same price