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Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

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Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#51

Post by mattacular »

pajeets wrote: post #7

Postgres can be scaled vertically like Stackoverflow did. With cache on edge for popular reads if you absolutely must (but you most likely dont). No need to microservice or sync read replicas even (unless you are making a game). No load balancers. Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels for heavy real world apps (99% of you wont ever run into this issue) Seriously its so create scalable backend services with postgres…

> Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels

not sure what CPU at TB levels means but hope your wallet scales better vertically

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#52

Post by cosmicradiance »

mattacular wrote: post #51
pajeets wrote: post #7

Postgres can be scaled vertically like Stackoverflow did. With cache on edge for popular reads if you absolutely must (but you most likely dont). No need to microservice or sync read replicas even (unless you are making a game). No load balancers. Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels for heavy real world apps (99% of you wont ever run into this issue) Seriously its so create scalable backend services with postgres…

> Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels not sure what CPU at TB levels means but hope your wallet scales better vertically

They are definitely not on the cloud.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#54

Post by neonsunset »

datadeft wrote: post #33

Scaling a non-scalabe by default framework that should have been few services written in a performance first language at a billion+ USD company. I am not sure why are we boliling the oceans for the sake of a language like Ruby and a framework like Rails. I love those to death but Amazons approach is much better (or it used to be): you can't make a service for 10.000+ users in anything else than: C++, Java (probably R…

Yup. As if there is no wealth of organizational knowledge and a particular first-party language to address this exact problem.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#55

Post by [deleted] »

ainiriand wrote: post #35
datadeft wrote: post #33

Scaling a non-scalabe by default framework that should have been few services written in a performance first language at a billion+ USD company. I am not sure why are we boliling the oceans for the sake of a language like Ruby and a framework like Rails. I love those to death but Amazons approach is much better (or it used to be): you can't make a service for 10.000+ users in anything else than: C++, Java (probably R…

You really do not know what you are talking about, it is not about the language, like it was repeated in this forum many many times already. We serve an application in PHP to thousands of users per second in less than 100ms constantly.

[deleted]

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#56

Post by ainiriand »

hamandcheese wrote: post #43
ainiriand wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really do not know what you are talking about, it is not about the language, like it was repeated in this forum many many times already. We serve an application in PHP to thousands of users per second in less than 100ms constantly.

Sometimes it is the language. Or at least the ecosystem and libraries available. My go-to example is graphql-ruby, which really chokes serializing complex object graphs (or did, it's been a while now since I've had to use it). It is pretty easy to consume 100s of ms purely on compute to serialize a complex graphql response.

I would make a case that that's not the language's fault. You need to assess how critical is speed in your requirements and adapt your solutions.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#57

Post by cies »

My experience scaling up Rails (mostly in size of codebase NOT in size of traffic) really made me love typesafe languages.

IDE smartness (auto complete, refactoring), compile error instead of runtime, clear APIs...

Kotlin is a pretty nice "Type-safe Ruby" to me nowadays.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#58

Post by ainiriand »

nov21b wrote: post #45
ainiriand wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use 5 ec2 instances to serve around 32 million requests per day on PHP, all under 100ms. It is not the language.

The language/runtime certainly has an impact. But indeed, in reality there is no way to compare these scaling claims. For all we know people are talking about serving a http-level cache without even hitting the runtime.

Each and every request reach the DB and/or Redis. MyISAM is deprecated, but is crazy fast if you mainly read.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#59

Post by andatki »

jojobas wrote: post #44

What's Rails and Postgres? Do they mean ASP.NET and MS SQL Server?

Rails and Postgres (and AWS) was the pre-acquisition stack, and development continued with that stack during this time period (2020-2021). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_(software)

Microsoft acquired companies with web and mobile platforms with varied backgrounds at a high rate. I got the sense that the tech stack—at least when it was based on open source—was evaluated for ongoing maintenance and evolution on a case by case basis. There was a cloud migration to Azure and encouragement to adopt Surface laptops and VS Code, but the leadership advocated for continuing development in the stack as feature development was ongoing, and the team was small.

Besides hosted commercial versions, I was happy to see Microsoft supporting community/open source PostgreSQL so much and they continue to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-po...

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#60

Post by neonsunset »

andatki wrote: post #59
jojobas wrote: post #44

What's Rails and Postgres? Do they mean ASP.NET and MS SQL Server?

Rails and Postgres (and AWS) was the pre-acquisition stack, and development continued with that stack during this time period (2020-2021). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_(software) Microsoft acquired companies with web and mobile platforms with varied backgrounds at a high rate. I got the sense that the tech stack—at least when it was based on open source—was evaluated for ongoing maintenance and evolution on a c…

PostgreSQL has been the most popular choice for greenfield .NET projects for a while too. There really isn't any vendor lock-in as most of the ecosystem is built with swappable components.
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