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Why is everything so scalable?

stavros.io

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#91

Post by fragmede »

sgarland wrote: post #68
reactordev wrote: post #53

I read this, and have the opposite experience. Your monolith will fester as developers step on each others toes. You aren’t solving for scalability, you’re solving for sovereignty. Giving other teams the ability to develop their own service without needing to conform to your archaic grey beard architecture restrictions and your lack of understanding what a pod is or how to get your logs from your cloud. No, this whol…

> Giving other teams the ability to develop their own service without needing to conform to your archaic grey beard architecture restrictions IME at many different SaaS companies, the only one that had serious reliability was the one that had “archaic grey beard architecture restrictions.” Devs want to use New Shiny X? Put a formal request before the architectural review committee; they’ll read it, then explain how w…

Splunk was (and is) the gold standard for centralized logging. The problem with it now is mainly that it's crazy expensive, though the operational engineering burden in order to run it well is non-zero and has to be accounted for. But being able to basically grep across all logs on the whole fleet, and then easily being able to visualize those results, made me never want to go back to having to ssh somewhere and run grep manually. I could write a script to ssh to all the app servers, grab the past 15 minutes of requests, extract their IPs, and plot them on a map to see which countries are hot, but that would be annoying enough that I'd really have to want to do that.

Meanwhile if you have Splunk, you specify the logfile name and how to extract the IP and then append "| iplocation clientip | geostats count by Country" to see which countries requests are coming from, for example. Or append "| stats count by http_version" and then click pie chart and get a visualization that breaks down how much traffic is still on HTTP 1.1, who's on 1.2, whos is on 2, and who's moved to QUIC/3.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#92

Post by bpicolo »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #24
radarsat1 wrote: post #2

> scalability needs a whole bunch of complexity I am not sure this is true. Complexity is a function of architecture. Scalability can be achieved by abstraction, it doesn't necessarily imply highly coupled architecture, in fact scalability benefits from decoupling as much as possible, which effectively reduces complexity. If you have a simple job to do that fits in an AWS Lambda, why not deploy it that way, scalabili…

> If you have a simple job to do that fits in an AWS Lambda, why not deploy it that way, scalability is essentially free. But the real advantage is that by writing it as a Lambda you are forced to think of it in stateless terms. What you are describing is already the example of premature optimization. The moment you are thinking of a job in terms of "fits in an AWS Lambda" you are automatically stuck with "Use S3 to…

> The moment you are thinking of a job in terms of "fits in an AWS Lambda" you are automatically stuck with "Use S3 to store the results" and "use a queue to manage the jobs" decisions.

I think the most important one you get is that inputs/outputs must always be < 6mb in size. It makes sense as a limitation for Lambda's scalability, but you will definitely dread it the moment a 6.1mb use case makes sense for your application.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#93

Post by stavros »

yobbo wrote: post #10

Many startup business models have no chance of becoming profitable unless they reach a certain scale, but they might have less than 1% probability of reaching that scale. Making it scalable is easy work since it is deterministic, but growing customers is not. Another perspective is that the defacto purpose of startups (and projects at random companies) may actually be work experience and rehearsal for the day the fou…

Unfortunately, you can't really get experience from solving hypothetical problems. The actual problems you'll encounter are different, and while you can get experience in a particular "scalable" stack, it won't be worth its maintenance cost for a company that doesn't need it.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#94

Post by huflungdung »

sgarland wrote: post #47
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

What I say is that we massively underestimate just how fast computers are these days

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#95

Post by [deleted] »

hsn915 wrote: post #11

I think it was around 2015 when everything was basically AWS and Kubernetes The turning point might have been Heroku? Prior to Heroku, I think people just assumed you deploy to a VPS. Heroku taught people to stop thinking about the production environment so much. I think people were so inspired by it and wanted to mimic it for other languages. It got more people curios about AWS. Ironically, while the point of Heroku…

[deleted]

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#96

Post by alpine01 »

There's a now famous Harvard lecture video on YouTube of Zuckerberg earlier in the Facebook days, where he walks through the issues they hit early on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE

I watched it ages ago, but I seem to remember one thing that I liked was that each time they changed the architecture, it was to solve a problem they had, or were beginning to have. They seemed to be staying away from pre-optimization and instead took the approach of tackling problems as they had as they appeared, rather than imagining problems long before/if they occurred.

It's a bit like the "perfect is the enemy of done" concept - you could spend 2-3x the time making it much more scalable, but that might have an opportunity cost which weakens you somewhere else or makes it harder/more expensive to maintain and support.

Take it with a pinch of salt, but I thought it seemed like quite a good level-headed approach to choosing how to spend time/money early on, when there's a lot of financial/time constraints.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#97

Post by _kb »

arealaccount wrote: post #76
ahoka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those over engineered systems even actually scalable? I know teams who designed a CQRS architecture using messages queues and a distributed NoSQL database and fail to sustain 10req/s for a read in something that is basically a CRUD application. Heck once someone literally said "But we use Kafka, why aren't we fast?!".

Exactly this, every time I see kafka or similar its a web of 10M microprocesses that take more time in invocation alone than if you just ran the program in one go.

How very kafkaesque.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#98

Post by bobdvb »

aeyes wrote: post #44
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

The architecture you describe is ok because in the end it is a fairly simple website. Little user interaction, limited amount of content (at most a few million records), few content changes per day. The most complex part is probably to have some kind of search engine but even with 10 million videos an ElasticSearch index is probably no larger than 1GB. The only problem is that there is a lot of video data.

In streaming your website is typically totally divorced from your media serving. Media serving is just a question of cloud storage and pointing at an hls/dash manifest in that object store. Once it starts playing the website itself does almost nothing. Live streaming adds more complexity but it's still not much of a website problem.

Maintaining the media lifecycle, receiving, transcoding, making it available and removing it, is the big task but that's not real-time, it's batch/event processing at best efforts.

The biggest challenges with streaming are maintaining the content catalogue, which aren't just a few million records but rich metadata about the lifecycle and content relationships. Then user management and payments tends to also have a significant overhead, especially when you're talking about international payment processing.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#99

Post by crazygringo »

llm_nerd wrote: post #85
crazygringo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Failures are astonishingly, vanishingly rare You and I must be using different sites and different clouds. There's a reason isitdownrightnow.com exists. And why HN'ers are always complaining about service status pages being hosted on the same services. By your logic, AWS and Azure should fail once in a millennium, yet they regularly bring down large chunks of the internet. Literally last week: https://cyberpress.or…

[flagged]

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#100

Post by skydhash »

sgarland wrote: post #47
BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

THANK YOU. People look at me like I’m insane when I tell them that their overly-complicated pipeline could be easily handled by a couple of beefy servers. Or at best, they’ll argue that “this way, they don’t have to manage infrastructure.” Except you do - you absolutely do. It’s just been partially abstracted away, and some parts like OS maintenance are handled (not that that was ever the difficult part of managing s…

I look at what I can do with an old mac mini (2011) and it’s quite good. I think the only issue with hardware is technical maintenance, but at the scale of a small companies, that would probably be having a support contract with Dell and co.
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