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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#81

Post by const_cast »

alkonaut wrote: post #57

Microservices vs not is (almost) orthogonal to N servers vs one. You can make 10 microservices and rent a huge server and run all 10 services. It's more an organizational thing than a deployment thing. You can't do the opposite though, make a monolith and spread it out on 10 servers.

> You can't do the opposite though, make a monolith and spread it out on 10 servers.

Yes you can. Its called having multiple applications servers. They all run the same application, just more of them. Maybe they connect to the same DB, maybe not, maybe you shard the DB.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#82

Post by api »

matt-p wrote: post #77
api wrote: post #73

I’ve found that it’s hard to even hire engineers who aren’t all in on cloud and who even know how to build without it. Even the ones who do know have been conditioned to tremble with fear at the thought of administrating things like a database or storage. These are people who can code cryptography kernels and network protocols and kernel modules, but the thought of running a K8S cluster or Postgres fills them with te…

I have also found this happening. It's actually really funny because I think even I'm less inclined to run postgres myself these days, when I used to run literally hundreds of instances with not much more than PG_DUMP, cron and two read only replicas. These days probably the best way of getting these 'cloudy' engineers on board is just to tell them its Kubernetes and run all of your servers as K3s.

I’m convinced that cloud companies have been intentionally shaping dev culture. Microservices in particular seem like a pattern designed to push managed cloud lock in. It’s not that you have to have cloud to use them, but it creates a lot of opportunities to reach for managed services like event queues to replace what used to be a simple function call or queue.

Dev culture is totally fad driven and devs are sheep, so this works.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#83

Post by Nextgrid »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #75

I often wonder if my home NAS/Server would be better off put onto a rented box or a cloud server somewhere, especially since I now have 1gbit/s internet. Even now the 20TB of drive space and 6 Cores with 32GB on Hetzner with a dedicated is about twice the price of buying the hardware over a 5 year period. I suspect the hardware will actually last longer than that and its the same level of redundancy (RAID) on a rente…

It really depends on your power costs. In certain parts of Europe, power is so expensive that Hetzner actually works out cheaper (despite them providing you the entire machine and datacenter-grade internet connection).

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#84

Post by bspammer »

matt-p wrote: post #74
shrubble wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than that - it's all the latency that you can remove from the equation with your bare-metal server. No network latency between nodes, less memory bandwidth latency/contention as there is in VMs, no caching architecture latency needed when you can just tell e.g. Postgres to use gigs of RAM and then let Linux's disk caching take care of the rest (and not need a separate caching architecture).

The difference between a fairly expensive ($300) RDS instance + EC2 in the same region vs a $90 dedicated server with a NVME drive and postgres in a container is absolutely insane.

A fair comparison would include the cost of the DBA who will be responsible for backups, updates, monitoring, security and access control. That’s what RDS is actually competing with.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#85

Post by Nextgrid »

bearjaws wrote: post #28
logifail wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and server hardware is expensive up front You don't need to buy server hardware(!), the article specifically mentions renting from eg Hetzner. > The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

> Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned? I run a lambda behind a load balancer, hardware dies, its redundant, it gets replaced. I have a database server fail, while it re provisions it doesn't saturate read IO on the SAN causing noisy neighbor issues. I don't deal with any of it, I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

> I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

You don't deal with that either if you rent a dedicated server from a hosting provider. They handle the datacenter and maintenance for you for a flat monthly fee.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#86

Post by Nextgrid »

jeffrallen wrote: post #52

I work for a cloud provider and I'll tell you, one of the reasons for the cloud premium is that it is a total pain in the ass to run hardware. Last week I installed two servers and between them had four mysterious problems that had to be solved by reseating cards, messing with BIOS settings, etc. Last year we had to deal with a 7 site, 5 country RMA for 150 100gb copper cables with incorrect coding in their EEPROMs.…

Fortunately, companies like Hetzner/OVH/etc will handle all this bullshit for you for a flat monthly fee.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#87

Post by matt-p »

bspammer wrote: post #84
matt-p wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a fairly expensive ($300) RDS instance + EC2 in the same region vs a $90 dedicated server with a NVME drive and postgres in a container is absolutely insane.

A fair comparison would include the cost of the DBA who will be responsible for backups, updates, monitoring, security and access control. That’s what RDS is actually competing with.

Totally. My frustration isn't even price though RDS is literally just dog slow.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#88

Post by themafia »

runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

On AWS if you want raw computational capacity you use Lambda and not EC2. EC2 is for legacy type workloads and doesn't have nearly the same scaling power and speed that Lambda does.

I have several workloads that just invoke Lambda in parallel. Now I effectively have a 1000 core machine and can blast through large workloads without even thinking about it. I have no VM to maintain or OS image to consider or worry about.

Which highlights the other difference that you failed to mention. Hertzner charges a "one time setup" fee to create that VM. That puts a lot of back pressure on infrastructure decisions and removes any scalability you could otherwise enjoy in the cloud.

If you want to just rent a server then Hertzner is great. If you actually want to run "in the cloud" then Hertzner is a non-starter.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#89

Post by icedchai »

jeffrallen wrote: post #59
Puts wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience after 20 years in the hosting industry is that customers in general have more downtime due to self-inflicted over-engineered replication, or split brain errors than actual hardware failures. One server is the simplest and most reliable setup, and if you have backup and automated provisioning you can just re-deploy your entire environment in less than the time it takes to debug a complex multi-server set…

Not to mention the other leading cause of outages: UPS's. Sigh.

UPSes always seem to have strange failure modes. I've had a couple fail after a power failure. The batteries died and they wouldn't come back up automatically when the power came back. They didn't warn me about the dead battery until after...

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#90

Post by matt-p »

themafia wrote: post #88
runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

On AWS if you want raw computational capacity you use Lambda and not EC2. EC2 is for legacy type workloads and doesn't have nearly the same scaling power and speed that Lambda does. I have several workloads that just invoke Lambda in parallel. Now I effectively have a 1000 core machine and can blast through large workloads without even thinking about it. I have no VM to maintain or OS image to consider or worry about…

Very few providers charge setup, some will provision a server within a 90s of an api call.
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