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“You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

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Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#71

Post by tyingq »

corobo wrote: post #10

I love these Twitter takes. They say something to get attention but if you look at it for more than a second it's.. it's just nothing data Comparing a troubleshooting guide to running a site on a couple of servers is a bit too different for me. Compare it to a troubleshooting guide for those two servers, let's see how they stack up. No using any "ask {specific person}" either Don't get me wrong, kubernetes is overkil…

People do tend to cherry pick, don't they? Most of Stack Overflow's workload is returning a blob of html for a given url, to a not-logged-in user. Where that html doesn't even have to be the most recently saved copy.

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#72

Post by [deleted] »

capableweb wrote: post #47
necrobrit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% and one of the great things about k8s is that this diagram applies to essentially any application. Standardisation is awesome.

Proper standardization is awesome. De facto, corp-owned standarization not so much.

[deleted]

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#73

Post by andrewingram »

p_l wrote: post #65
JimDabell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can be built using tried and true solutions like MySQL + PHP, which are horizontally scalable with database sharding, read replicas, and maybe stuff like memcached to accumulate votes before updating the database or a CDN for caching static files. > Google has different problems and different workloads Which of these do you think most organisations most closely resemble? I don’t think anybody would disagree if y…

Stack Overflow is also a) old system built before a lot of current management tech was available openly b) Very single-application centered. EDIT: To expand on it - they had to manually build a lot of what could be much easier handled today, and thus had no incentive to change later. Interestingly enough, SO has a lot of moving parts distributed over multiple servers, even if all of those servers used to fit into 1-3…

The single vs multiple application centric thing is a point that's not made enough. Google is basically now a company all about spinning up new products, rather than just periodically adding a new piece of tech to an existing product. As a layperson, Kubernetes _appears_ to be about making it easier to spin up (and run) new products, so it feels more appropriate for Google-like org types.

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#74

Post by pjmlp »

sofixa wrote: post #43
codeulike wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the stats on Stackoverflow https://stackexchange.com/performance 1.3 billion page views per month, 9 web servers, 4 sql servers Stackoverflow is notable because they went down the C#/MVC/SQL Server route from the start, which meant much better performance per server. Thats why they make an interesting counterexample to the usual way...

> Stackoverflow is notable because they went down the C#/MVC/SQL Server route from the start, which meant much better performance per server And also notable because everything is under an expensive license, so big performant servers is the cheaper option. Edit: everything = Windows servers for their .NET app ( apparently in the process of migrating to .NET Core) and SQL Server

License costs are peanuts in traditional enterprise bugdgets, when mapped across the overall costs of developer salaries, contracting, designer agencies, travel expenses,....

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#75

Post by pjmlp »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #22

I hate when stack overflow is held up as an example of how we can run any system on “a few servers” - stacknoverflow has like 3 features and has an engineering focus on the single goal of performance and keeping on running on the small subset of servers. Every other project as different constraints.

Just like there are people that love to setup an Hadoop cluster for data that fits into a USB pen, there are others that love to ramp up a Kubernetes cluster for what is a typical three tiered application.

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#76

Post by p_l »

fabian2k wrote: post #60
chrismorgan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t. From your link: • 9 web servers • 4 SQL servers • 2 Redis servers • 3 tag engine servers • 3 Elasticsearch servers • 2 HAProxy servers That comes to 23. I know “a couple” is sometimes used to mean more than two, but… not that much more than two. “A couple” is just flat-out wrong; I’d guess that he’s misinterpreting ancient figures, taking the figures from no later than about 2013 about how many web ser…

One interesting aspect is that the number of servers is much higher than what would actually be needed to run the site, most servers run at something like 10% CPU or lower. Most of the duplication is for redundancy. As far as I remember they could run SO and the entire network on two web servers and one DB server (and I assume 1 each of the other ones as well). If someone says SO runs on a couple servers this might b…

IIRC, without emergency redeploying, they might have issue running less than 4 - not sure if the tag server can coexist with web server anymore for example, redis is still a dependency, so is haproxy, separated SQL and IIS, etc.

Then there's support services (iirc, all of elasticsearch was non-functional requirements stuff and technically could be run without?) and HA.

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#78

Post by gregoriol »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #70
codeulike wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the stats on Stackoverflow https://stackexchange.com/performance 1.3 billion page views per month, 9 web servers, 4 sql servers Stackoverflow is notable because they went down the C#/MVC/SQL Server route from the start, which meant much better performance per server. Thats why they make an interesting counterexample to the usual way...

You left off 10 servers: 2 Redis servers, 3 tag engine servers, 3 Elasticsearch servers, and 2 HAProxy servers. So, that's 23 servers in total, which is not a trivial amount, but also not a huge number, either.

What is really interesting to me is that they just have a very small number of each kind. It's not like they have 50 redis servers, it's just 2. 2 looks more like a smaller project ar first, but it's great proof that a lot can be achieved by doing engineering.

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#79

Post by p_l »

tluyben2 wrote: post #38
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #22

I hate when stack overflow is held up as an example of how we can run any system on “a few servers” - stacknoverflow has like 3 features and has an engineering focus on the single goal of performance and keeping on running on the small subset of servers. Every other project as different constraints.

I hate it when people act like every other project has different constraints. For most web projects that is simply not the case. Maybe in some cases there are small differences which won't be noticed by any run of the mill setup. If your constraints are different but you have 100 members and never more (like most startups) your constraints generally don't matter even if they are radically different. Most people here…

Or maybe we're running a more complex infra not because of scaling, but because declarative setup free from expense of cloud services (esp. important outside of SV/rUSA bubble) can mean that hosting the services that are needed to run the project can be made cheaper, both in time and materiel.

Re: “You don't need this overengineered goo for your project.”

#80

Post by sofixa »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
sofixa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stackoverflow is notable because they went down the C#/MVC/SQL Server route from the start, which meant much better performance per server And also notable because everything is under an expensive license, so big performant servers is the cheaper option. Edit: everything = Windows servers for their .NET app ( apparently in the process of migrating to .NET Core) and SQL Server

License costs are peanuts in traditional enterprise bugdgets, when mapped across the overall costs of developer salaries, contracting, designer agencies, travel expenses,....

Is StackOverflow a traditional enterprise for you? I don't think they have huge travel expenses...
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