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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this just a podcast website, or is there something more to it? Why on earth would a podcast website need Kube?

Not knowing what changelog.com is, I was wondering the same thing... from the header of the page, I could tell that there's a blog, a podcast, and a newsletter.

Without some additional insight that I don't have, it does seem that this is an enormously over-engineered "solution" for a website -- I've NFI why it requires 99.99% uptime!

Perhaps they look it as a goal or challenge, an opportunity to showcase their knowledge and skills to potential customers, or, hell, maybe they just enjoy that kind of thing? If that's the case, I completely understand and can even relate (my home network is a textbook example of an "over-engineered solution": close to a dozen "enterprise-class" servers in the basement, ~35 various subnets, VMware Enterprise Plus clusters, BGP for anycast, and so on).

AFAICT, though, this is just some developers running a blog and podcasts aimed at other developers? I mean, we're not exactly talking about a "mission critical" web site that's going to result in death and destruction the next time it goes down or Linode shits itself, right?

Or am I missing something?

EDIT: I've read through the rest of the comments now ...

> This is for fun, to some degree ... We don’t really need this setup. One, it’s about learning ourselves, but then also sharing that ... It’s fun to do.

... and I completely understand!

It's kind a brand marketing paradox.

1. We're great engineers because we can set and maintain such an impressive set-up.

2. We're terrible engineers because all of this could probably done one server for dynamic content + S3 for dynamic content. Or not even S3, maybe just some Cloudflare or Akamai caching.

Of course, like the posters above, I could be missing something due to my outsider/consumer view of changelog.

We are both! I would also add lazy to that paradox. My surname is a letter off, and that's at close as it gets : )

The devil is in the details, there is more to it than dynamic & static content, we are using Fastly, otherwise we couldn't serve all the traffic that we do.

The best part is that it's all public - https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com - and we welcome contributions, especially those that simplify our setup without compromising on resiliency and availability. I'm looking forward to yours ; )

The site does a lot more than merely hosting podcasts.

There’s a very active news feed with submissions, commenting, newsletter subscriptions and management, a blog, episode requests, live streams, etc.

Check out the source to see what all the app does:

https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com

They don't: "It’s worth noting that we don’t really need what we have around Kubernetes." from another comment somewhere in here.

Yea that is what I was thinking. And the next thing was what is the price difference. A bit of me thinks this is just some people doing some really cool tech work for the sake of it, which I can't fault them for.

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