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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

> and a load balancer

> not optimizing my cloud infrastructure for scale that might never be needed

I don't understand why you would want a load balancer with that mentality. Feels like most companies will never reach a scale where load balancing is necessary.

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besides scalability there's also fault tolerance.

sure the DB might still be a single point of failure as is the load balancer, but some rogue web processes hogging your single server or a disk failure bringing it down

Also, never underestimate the utility of being able to perform upgrades (either the app or the underlying infrastructure) with little to no downtime.

Load balancers don't just do scale. They provide a separation of concerns, and for a "simple app" (i.e. the kind were talking about here), a vendor provided one (AWS elb for example) is very easy to set up.

Our LB does a bunch of heavy lifting for us. It handles SSL termination, static routing (we serve a bunch of content from S3), handles Auth for our internal "management" endpoints, and because we use containers it gives us health checks, auto restarts, and rolling deploys. I'm pretty sure we have about 30lines of terraform to support all of that.

Right... there are a lot of contradictions in their comment. You want to focus on your product, by managing your own server(s)? You don't want to over engineer early on but you're running a load balancer and n-servers? Why not a single server? Or, offload the management entirely to someone else and focus on your product.

It’s not contradictory if read with an understanding that one can be experienced and comfortable with the amount of server management required for a product at its current and likely future states. This makes the management piece less demanding than evaluating then learning an unfamiliar paradigm and the question marks that go along with that.

Maybe they mean reverse proxy? Often these come in the same product (see HAProxy). This can be used like Traefik to basically just proxy http requests to the right containers/applications based on host header or sni but it also has real load balancing capabilities too.

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