Hacker News Reader

Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

As of 2016, this was the list of all the machines needed to run stack overflow [1]:

    4 Microsoft SQL Servers
    11 IIS Web Servers
    2 Redis Servers
    3 Tag Engine servers
    3 Elasticsearch servers
    4 HAProxy Load Balancers
    2 Networks
    2 Fortinet 800C Firewalls
    2 Cisco ASR-1001 Routers
    2 Cisco ASR-1001-x Routers

Next time you're debugging connection issues between your canary webserver kubernetes deployment and redis cluster misc-3, ask yourself: are we serving more traffic than stack overflow?

[1] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

View on HN

I feel like we need a campaign to help developers understand just how powerful modern server hardware is when you can get at it directly.

Kestrel is pushing 7 million plaintext requests per second on techempower. And their test rig is certainly not the best you can get these days.

The cloud has ruined our perception of computing hardware. If I have a choice between owning a physical machine in order to meet a performance objective, or building out a 20 node k8 cluster in AWS for some notion of scalability, I am going to shell out for the physical machine and happily drive to the data center to install it myself.

Who would honestly prefer more computers over fewer computers to manage? Even if its in the cloud its still a fucking mess. The entire game of software engineering is about managing complexity. Not creating more of it and making it someone else's problem.

So whose going to sign up to be on call 24/7 when your physical hardware breaks?

Paying for someone to manage the hardware is included in my assumptions. If you are asking "who would consider the role?" the answer is - Anyone who wants the money.

Who fixes Amazon's shit when it breaks at 3AM?

Amazon Employees. Not me or my co-workers.

Who pays their wage ? You do by overpaying 20x+ for your vps.

One FTE that does on-call system engineering is wayyyy more expensive than a fleet of 20 vm's. Not to mention the cost of hardware itself.

I know there's a threshold where the cost benefit works in favor of on prem, but it's nowhere near most 20 node k8s clusters.

> One FTE that does on-call system engineering is wayyyy more expensive than a fleet of 20 vm's. Not to mention the cost of hardware itself.

Note that rented dedicated servers are 20x cheaper. What you're talking about, colocation, is 50x cheaper.

You're not really out of the weeds when it comes to dedicated servers either. You still need an on call resource to manage the software in that scenario.

> Next time you're debugging connection issues between your canary webserver kubernetes deployment and redis cluster misc-3, ask yourself: are we serving more traffic than stack overflow?

Kubernetes is a configuration management system first and foremost. It can be useful even if you run a low number of very powerful machines. In fact, most of our k8s clusters are like that - no fancy SDN, just a couple of very beefy machines with simple subnet routing among them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com