Isn't stackoverflow, incidentally, one of the websites who would benefit the most from caching, given their content supposedly is going to be static the majority of the time?
This is addressed in one of the linked tweets.
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 scienc…
Great, now you have an nginx reverse proxy as a load balancer in front of a few servers. Now sort out log storage, certificate expiry, access controls, patch management, health monitoring, and remote administration, update it whenever you add or remove backend servers for maintenance, and make sure to synch it up to DNS, and you’ve almost got the same capability as an AWS ELB. Except yours doesn’t have high availability or horizontal autoscaling.
Getting all of that stuff right actually kind of gets close to rocket science. Which can be worth doing… but just be aware that Amazon will happily sell you a rocket kit.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#73Please ignore my lack of understanding a bit here. I'm genuinely trying to learn. I've always heard (and it made sense to me) that to reduce latency of requests from across the globe, you might want to have read replicas or caches spread on global infrastructure. Then how is it that stack overflow is fast here when the db is on-prem, 7 seas across from me? Any amount of RAM should not account for the distance, right?
You can put a big dent in the impact of the speed of light if you keep round-trips to a minimum.
This is one advantage of server-rendered HTML (though that's not the only option you have).
It also helps that StackOverflow is light on interactivity. You load a page, read for a minute, then maybe click a vote button or open a textarea to discuss. As long as the text and styles load quickly, you won't notice if progressive enhancement scripts take a little more time to load.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You don't, really. You can use Django or Perl today and just enable nginx caching for non authenticated users, for many applications. Stack Overflow didn't need these optimizations. They could have just deployed 20 servers instead and still been profitable. People optimized just because they like to.
Yes, Microsoft SQL Server is famous for its ability to get faster just by adding more servers.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#75Even 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…
I think the other point being - very few applications need this kind of scaling.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 scienc…
Great, now you have an nginx reverse proxy as a load balancer in front of a few servers. Now sort out log storage, certificate expiry, access controls, patch management, health monitoring, and remote administration, update it whenever you add or remove backend servers for maintenance, and make sure to synch it up to DNS, and you’ve almost got the same capability as an AWS ELB. Except yours doesn’t have high availabil…
I'm not an "on-premise bare-metal server absolutist". Of course there are trade offs in terms of convenience but there are also trade offs in terms of cost and performance and vendor lock-in. It all depends on what you need and what are your specific constraints.
Is time to market critical? Will you have daily traffic fluctuation between 10 to 10k users? Will you lose a ton of money/customers for any service interruption? By all means use the latest version of managed kubernetes combined with whatever other cloud service tickles those itches. But don't forget to always keep an eye on your bills and think how can you reduce them by simplifying your architecture.
But if you're just building a corporate intranet for a few dozen users who log in once a week I'm pretty sure a simple VM (even if managed in AWS) would make much more sense.
And if you really want to roll your own there are plenty of options to make your life much easier compared to sending a rocket into outer-space. Yes it's more work upfront but after you do the setup the first time there's little to do.
infra automation & templates: - ansible, docker, etc
log storage: - mount shared storage - ELK - use a paid LaaS or monitoring SaaS
certificate management (on LB machine only): - certbot
access controls: - linux user and groups management
patch management: - enable unattanded upgrades for security patches
health monitoring: - in terms of lb nginx has that built in. - for more advanced use cases use a paid service (new relic) or a free one (nagios)
remote administration: - ansible, etc.
Don't get me wrong I use cloud on a daily basis for work, I'm just sad because most teams don't know how to use it effectively without jumping the gun.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fair point, but my argument doesn't vary terribly much.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#78It'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.
It think OP is only referring to server architecture. And as you say there is no cache server. So cacheless server architecture.
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://stats.pingdom.com/w2oc4thvox7s/73676/history
Seems to be testing from just one location, as far as I can tell? Randomly, packets time out on the internet, I would take this random dashboard with a grain of salt, we cannot be sure SO had a outage just because one request happen to fail.
On the other hand, if they had a 'down for maintenance' page up, pings would still work
Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith
#80Even 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…
Minor correction but that’s Nick Craver https://nickcraver.com/