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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading a scaling-out article from some startup. Some of the things felt a little over-engineered, some were impressive, some seemed wrong. But then they get to the point where they brag about their scale, and the metric they used was that they can handle thousands of requests.... per day.

View on HN

https://engineering.hellofresh.com/scaling-hellofresh-api-ga...

...with only 10+ high-CPU large machines.

With that level of traffic, they could run their entire frontend from a smartphone...

Why did you have to type that. Now in my free time there's a 50/50 chance I am going to waste minutes or even hours looking into the viability of running a postgres/sinatra/nginx app on a phone.

Something about that appeals to me in a huge way. Showing people my "server room", etc etc.

Attach the phone to a small weather balloon, and you can have a real "cloud hosted" setup.

Plot twist: Run it from a flip phone.

There's a bunch of httpd apps on the Play Store, many complete with database engines and all that.

Phones are expensive. Raspberry Pi.

ergh, you weren't kidding. I hope that was a typo on their part; even low thousands rpm is mostly not a big deal on modern hardware.

   Our gateway is on the frontline of our infrastructure. It receives thousands 
   of request per day, and for that reason we chose Go when building it, 
   because of its performance, simplicity, and elegant solution to concurrency.

For all we know the blog is a work of fiction and they're running off a laptop...

Holy shit! I almost didn't believe you.

Then again, if they didn't have that beefy infrastructure, they could get DDOS'd from up to multiple request per minute! I mean you can't be too careful when you are in that league!!1!

Also interesting (in the same way as rubbernecking a car crash) is going to their homepage and viewing source.

I didn't want to share the original article, but you found it :) Then again, Google search doesn't turn up many other results bragging about thousands of requests per day.

'Dashboards around the office show how the system is performing at any given time.'

Probably was someone's full time job for a couple months.

When was this written? Why is there no year in the date?

Granted, HDMI can be infuriating, but months?

More seriously, you can set this up with KPIs in a day with Zabbix. A week, if you've never dealt with Zabbix, which is admittedly somewhat complex compared to some of the others.

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

But setting up a data warehouse that builds out the KPIs you're looking for along with a dashboard to display them (the easy part, for sure) can certainly take over a month.

I am surprised they are still up, given the amount of attention from the HN community ;-)

I think their CDNs are saving their 10+ High CPU servers from the load.

This is hilarious and sad at the same time. However, most of these write ups are aimed at attracting talent. Even more, some tech stacks are deliberately built to attract talent when the core domain is just too simple or boring. "We serve user subscriptions and recipe data from an SQL database using Rails" just doesn't sound as snappy as the infra-porn on the blog.

Your attitude frankly sucks.

How can it be a bad thing for developers to write about what they are working on ? Not all developers are genius experts who suddenly woke up one day and instantly knew how to perfectly architect a system. People learn, people grow, people make mistakes and most importantly people need feedback.

Blogs like this are fantastic to (a) learn what other people are doing and (b) for developers to have an opportunity to show off and be proud of what they are working on. Especially since the rest of the company in most cases isn't going to care less.

It's great to write about your tech. But unless blogging is your business model, it's not great to pick your tech so you can write about it.

Isn't that kind of thing a real red flag for the kind of talent you'd want to attract? If someone told me they'd built a GPU compute cluster for their phpbb based social club forum, I'd think they were an idiot and not want to work with them.

Absolutely. I'm running into this problem constantly in the front-end dev world. Most developers I talk to are way too eager to list off a million cool techs that they're familiar with, most of which are completely inappropriate for the job at hand.

If I'm interviewing a candidate, I'm not interested in which tools they know how to use. I'm interested in whether they understand the problem those tools solve and when to apply them. Over-engineering is problem #1 with the community at large in front-end dev at the moment and you'll go a long way as an engineering team if you make it your priority to defeat that mentality.

I am sorry if I'm completely off base but I'm still thinking about the danluu page on options v cash which quotes this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11200296

Maybe startups don't want the absolute best of the best but rather the best of the gullible?

Edit and or poor

So you're thinking that kind of technical mark-missing is the startup equivalent of the typos and other glaring errors in email scams? They're to weed out the people smart enough to be a problem?

If I'm ever in a position when I'm needing to attract talent, that would not the kind of talent I want to attract.

I'd want grumpy, paranoid sysadmins who really don't want to be woken up late at night because something has gone wrong.

Be honest, were they hosted on their founder's smartphone?

Great idea! I should try this for my next project ;-)

At the other end of the scale, an acquaintance of mine is a sysadmin for a government department, and can't get their web framework changed to his frustration (politics...). He gave an example of the websites he has to look after, one being a boring legal website ("so you can imagine how low the traffic is already...") and the software could barely serve one request per second!

Hey, that was a major milestone for a RoR app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com