That defies the laws of physics. How can they be web scale without cloud and microservices?
Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
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Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#52Imagine trying to present this kind of architecture to a room full of executives already sold on the "benefits" of kubernetes, big data, serverless, etc.
Hah. I get your point but it would be an easy sell for them. The impossible sell would be to engineers. Executives would just compare operating costs estimates.
Good point, for normal executives (whatever that means). In my little bubble most executives I have to deal with believe themselves to be on par with solution/enterprise architects and they like to show this by saying stuff like: "Let's use microservices and kubernetes for better scalability, everybody's doing it..."
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#53Imagine trying to present this kind of architecture to a room full of executives already sold on the "benefits" of kubernetes, big data, serverless, etc.
The use case is simple i.e. web front end, thin app layer, database. So if you were to implement this same architecture using Kubernetes or Serverless it would be as equally simple as a bunch of Ansible or Puppet scripts.
Agreed, but would most engineers understand that they can keep the simplicity of the solution if the underlying infrastructure is based in the cloud/serverless/etc?
Fro my limited experience many engineers fall in the trap of adding accidental complexity to an otherwise simple architecture just by trying to use the latest/coolest cloud architecture trend.
Monolith in the cloud on kubernetes? Speak no such abomination. Of course we have to do microservices, the more the better. How can we scale otherwise?
SQL DB? What is this, 2010? Of course we're going to use Cosmos DB, how else could we get "single-digit millisecond response times, automatic and instant scalability, along with guarantee speed at any scale".
Of course I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect but I rarely see teams disciplined enough to keep cloud architectures simple and clean.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#54The best cache is the one built into the database. People seem to forget that the major rdbmses have sophisticated cache strategies of their own and that handing them more RAM (and ensuring they are configured to use it for query or other cache) is usually a good first strategy before trying to second guess and reinvent the cache outside the db. Thread says SO allocates 1.5TB RAM to SQL Server. Sounds wise.
Makes sense. Traditional RDBMSs are basically a buffer cache and a query optimization engine.
If the data is sitting in memory, and you've tuned extracting the data from memory as fast as possible, job done.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#55It's not cacheless. There are countless caches throughout (including what appears to be ~1TB of memory in the database server), just not a dedicated cache machine.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#56Is there a website that tracks outages of other websites like Stack Overflow over years? I know some that tell you if it's down right now, but not over years. I have a subjective feeling that Stack Overflow is down a lot more than other websites. I don't see that ever mentioned in the discussion of cloud vs on-prem which makes the discussion seem lacking.
That’s an engineering choice not cloud vs. cloud. How many services are down when AWS us-east has a problem?
True. But cloud makes it a lot easier. In some cases it's built-in, like S3. In others it's a checkbox like RDS Multi-AZ. And if you need to roll your own, multi-AZ or even multi-region is much more straightforward than renting another rack somewhere.
I have personally seen Stack Overflow be "under maintenance" or straight up down a lot more than I have seen entire us-east-1 down.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#57Even though I love their simplicity as an example of how to be pragmatic and not over-engineer, do remember that they’ve tuned their code to the point that they built an ORM that is one of the fastest in the NET world. I used it and it was awesomely lightweight. It’s as much an example of how far world class talent can go, as it is about doing more with less.
Yep. Following some of the SO folks on Twitter a while back, I remember watching them do all sorts of things with .NET that didn’t feel remotely “necessary” for a Q&A website. It’s not like you can pull people off the street and have them get away with infrastructure this simple.
> It’s not like you can pull people off the street and have them get away with infrastructure this simple
I know that in many cases simple != easy but I can't help feeling sad while reading this.
When I started my career cloud wasn't yet mainstream bu as a beginner I was able to deploy and configure a nginx proxy and loadbalance between 2-3 backend servers without too much effort. It wasn't some kind of rocket science.
I guess the current issue is that cloud has been marketed so much that nobody who's just starting out in the industry even has a second thought about using it by default. What can I say, great job from the cloud providers in capturing their customers as soon as they get in front of the store.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#58Imagine trying to present this kind of architecture to a room full of executives already sold on the "benefits" of kubernetes, big data, serverless, etc.
The use case is simple i.e. web front end, thin app layer, database. So if you were to implement this same architecture using Kubernetes or Serverless it would be as equally simple as a bunch of Ansible or Puppet scripts.
Keep in mind that the only reason this works is because it's all running on beefy bare-metal servers.
If you want to run it on Kubernetes I hope you know how to install/maintain K8S on-prem, because there's no way you're going to get this level of performance from any cloud provider (not at a sane price anyway).
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microservices became a synonym for Services Orientated Architecture years ago. It's almost always relatively normal sized services split by functional area e.g. Auth, Cache etc.
SOA was all XML at the API level. Serverless is RESTful, lower-level, and coupled to the cloud-provider's menu of containers, key/value store, authentication, &c. "Synonymous" seems a stretch.
The comparison was between SOA and microservices. No one mentioned serverless.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#60Even though I love their simplicity as an example of how to be pragmatic and not over-engineer, do remember that they’ve tuned their code to the point that they built an ORM that is one of the fastest in the NET world. I used it and it was awesomely lightweight. It’s as much an example of how far world class talent can go, as it is about doing more with less.
Right - Marc Gravell and Tim Craver, who worked on the core architecture of Stack Overflow, were both so obsessive about extracting performance from .net web applications that when they couldn’t do any more from the outside, they both quit and went to work for Microsoft on performance improvements in the framework itself. I feel like it’s similar to how people point to Craigslist as evidence that you can still build…
Except that servers are literally 50-100x more powerful than they were when these sites were built. You just don't need legendary talent anymore to accomplish pretty reasonable scaling with a simple low server count architecture.