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Comment by exikyut | Hacker News Reader

> Over capacity

> The demo is limited to 16 concurrent instances and 2 libvirt connections. Due to these limitations we were unable to spawn a new instance to service your request. Please try again later.

Kool.

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Did they just inadvertently point out why this is a bad idea for anything general-purpose?

Not really; those are exactly the sort of config settings you'd sensibly use to prevent someone from DDoSing your untrusted prototype-level infrastructure.

If your VMs are truly cheap, and you've ironed out the kinks from your proof-of-concept, you'd obviously set up your production system to run more than 16 of them.

Right, and who decides that a request coming from a customer ot an attacker? If the attacker can generate enough requests non of the customers have a chance to use your service. This is absolutely not the way to handle DDoS.

My point was that it's a sensible strategy for the demo of a technology that's still under development (like this project), where you don't actually have any "customers." In production, you'd let it scale unboundedly, and combine it with some sort of anti-DDoS technology like Cloudflare.

It depends on how many resources it takes to run those 16 instances. If it's an extremely small demo allocation, then that's not a big deal. If it's multiple gigabytes and cores then the efficiency is awful.

The point is to show boot times. If you are scaling up/down in response to load, this is a nice quality to have. Most folks have really spiky traffic patterns so this can save you a lot of money.

Obviously no one would ever run something like this 1 vm per request thing irl.

Never say never...

> Obviously no one would ever run something like this 1 vm per request thing irl.

I can see plenty of use-cases for doing just that. Large uploads, time-consuming request/responses such as server-side data processing, RPC, as a backend behind a caching front-end so that it only has to respond to invalidated cache entries, etc.

I don't see many people using this to actually serve general website requests though. It'd probably be modified to serve multiple requests until nothing is left to do and then exit.

They should spawn more overlords instead.

You have not enough Vespene Gas

Overlords only need mineral, 100 each.

You're right. Mea culpa, I always played Protoss.

in case you haven’t already noticed, hacker news is not a place for jokes...

We require more mineralsssss

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