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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

When you don't need transactions, don't have a cache invalidation problem, and are querying read-only data, then this architecture - or really any architecture that takes advantage of what makes HTTP scalable, mostly idempotent, cacheable responses to GETs - makes sense.

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I do think it is a bit disingenuous that the author compares this to a classic web application and its data needs, when the needs here are so trivial. It is very well designed for what it does (the security needs of such a checker almost dictates the design), but is a model usable by very few applications.

As an aside, the article talks a bit about Brotli and it's worth noting that Brotli is nothing more than LZ77 with a dictionary pre-seeded with a 119KB static dictionary of commonly seen web text. It is of course going to be fantastic for compressing an HTML document, where much of the content is verbose and common, but would do nothing above gzip for the hash result data. I would be surprised if it yielded a single byte of savings in that case. Brotli is supported by most browsers as it was snuck into the WOFF 2.0 standard, so browsers that support the new web font standard automatically have to support Brotli.

https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2016/01/28/eat-your-brotli...

But it looks like IIS doesn't support brotli yet. Which also means it is probably not supported in azure either.

Depends on whether you compare this to what a classic web application should be doing versus what it actually does.

Not to mention that the dataset is relatively small.

A 16GB of ram server could basically serve responses sub-millisecond at line rate for like $25/month.

Where are you getting 16GB ram for $25 a month? Would be pretty handy.

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud has 16GB for $20

https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ has 16GB just over $20

A Hetzner CX41 is 16GB RAM @ €15.90/mo (about 18 usd) https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

I currently have 2TB HDD, 16GB RAM, infinite bandwidth (100Mbps U/D) for 19.19€/month IIRC at Kimsufi [0]

[0] https://www.kimsufi.com

And that pitches out the window fault tolerance or replicability unless nontrivial developer work is dumped into it. If the disk goes farming in your Kimsufi instance, you are looking at a bad day.

That really wasn't the point of my reply.

Sure, if the machine dies, my services die. But it's still dirt cheap.

A dirt bike is cheap, too. It's not a car. It's definitely not a good car. It doesn't have much to help you when you hit a tree.

I pay 30 USD for 16 gig ram 6 TB hdd and high end I7. Its cheaper then buying the hardware and running it at my home. EC would cost me 130$ just for the instance excluding the 6TB space. So far my server has more then 1000 days uptime 0 problems. Also if you have 1 instance in a cloud or 1 instance on a dedi you should still have backup plans in place. Cloud is good for variable load, defenitly not for constant load. Also you get dedi's with san storage if all you care about is storage.

and 200-400ms latency to not-Europe.

210ms from South Africa, 91ms from NYC, 198ms from India, 360ms from Melbourne, 55ms from Morocco.

It's really not that bad...

A DNS request/response, TCP handshake, SSL handshake and last but not least an HTTP request/response is an awful lot of 210ms round trips.

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