Just out of curiosity, how would you design a distributed website like this? How can this be done simpler?
(1): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/stati...
If it's really low, I can imagine why it was made distributed. Otherwise, I'd see that as a demo and an exercise.
> If it's really low, I can imagine why it was made distributed.
If an extremely low SLA is the goal, I would not be home-rolling a distributed website technology stack. The more moving pieces you have, the more likely one of them is to fail.
The recipe for a high availability, high reliability website is relatively simple in the age of Cloudflare and other cheap hosted services. Introducing a lot of complexity and home-grown solutions is the last thing you want for high availability unless you have scores of engineers to maintain it and you can't solve it through traditional means.
(For a personal informational site I'd take a static site generator.)
In any case, with a distributed architecture there are many parts that can break. Fewer moving parts means fewer broken pieces.
Uploading media files to (or from) developing countries with weaker internet infra often results in timeouts and dropped connections. I tried uploading a 8GB file to Singapore S3 from Florida and my connection often timed out.
I'm trying to imagine how you can deliver a fast website to users around the globe without distributed systems.
If this guy were pragmatic, a Ruby on Rails/django app in heroku would do wonders. If he wants to promote React because that's what he sells, that's a different story.
The problem is the people taking what this guy says as "the modern way to do it" and then you find the messes you find at work.
Sorry for my dumbness, but not sure what a repost invite is. Something good I hope XD.
Thanks.
For anyone who's wondering: a repost invite is a way of getting a post into the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page. If the original submission is older than a few days, we don't re-up it, but rather invite the submitter to repost it. Then it goes automatically into the pool. So yes, it's something good :)
A single small server running a typical web framework (anything from django to asp.net to laravel) can easily serve all these pages in milliseconds. Add a CDN in front to cache and serve quickly to users around the world.