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Comment by mynameisvlad | Hacker News Reader

And if your MBP were to die today? Or if a burst of traffic came through? Or if you closed the lid and forgot to turn Caffeinate on?

Surely you can understand why people don't routinely host all their project's infrastructure on their laptops, even if the technical specs are enough.

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> And if your MBP were to die today? Or if a burst of traffic came through? Or if you closed the lid and forgot to turn Caffeinate on?

So ... two macbooks then?

> Surely you can understand why people don't routinely host all their project's infrastructure on their laptops, even if the technical specs are enough.

I think the poster was simply highlighting that 150GiB of storage, 6TiB of transfer and around 4 requests per second to an average of maybe[1] 26 users per minute might not necessarily need a K8 cluster and 8 different cloud services.

[1] I'm taking "thousands of users" to mean "up to 19000", otherwise they would have said tens of thousands, dozens of thousands, etc.

Then they should have said that.

But even then, you’re just pushing the cost onto the person maintaining the system.

Cloudflare R2 => Now you have to bootstrap and maintain your own high availability Minio cluster. On multiple servers in multiple data centers for redundancy, of course.

Cloudflare Workers/Pages => Now you have to maintain your own compute runner (granted, could be as simple as a docker container but that still both requires work to set up and transition over as well as maintain over time) and load balancer (once again, just Nginx or Apache but that requires setup and maintenance) to execute and serve this content.

Cloudflare Access => Now you have to maintain your own access control system like ory.

Cloudflare Tunnels => If you’re only running one node, this isn’t needed, so congrats I guess. You’d still need to provide internal access if you have multiple nodes in a HA environment, though.

AWS EC2 => Now you need to maintain your own VMs.

Etc.

This is a volunteer project. Having someone maintain all these things may not be even remotely practical.

It’s all the rage to hate on cloud services in 2023 but they abstract away a lot of operational work and that’s not something to be blindly discounted.

For some values of "half to".

It's an open source game... if the site goes down for 10 minutes every now and then, would anyone even notice?

The more niche something is, the more vocal the members. So, yes. People would probably notice.

But also, the point was that a MacBook (or single server) can just replace the infrastructure defined in the article. That is clearly not the case if you’re suddenly losing uptime. That is a material deterioration, any way you put it.

And even if you didn’t choose to go the HA route, you still need to set up and maintain the server and all the things running on it. And fix issues when they come up. Choosing to have downtime does not magically make any of what I said go away; it at most eases the burden slightly.

Nobody cares about 99.999% uptime of an open source game. Nobody needs a sub-second convergence time of 99.999% of existing companies' networks. A couple of minutes of downtime is non-issue.

> Maintaining the server

You make it sound like it's a problem. It is not.

Oh yes, a random person on HN says something is a non-issue so their word must be gospel. Definitely.

I explained exactly what needs to be maintained and why that’s a lot of work. You are free to disagree, but just saying “trust me bro” is not a compelling argument.

Have you ever maintained your own server? Or even tried? It’s not nearly as easy as you clearly think it is.

Oh, I remember you. This amount of hostility to the world is difficult not to notice. So at least you're not a rando here. Clearly a name to remember.

> It’s not nearly as easy as you clearly think it is.

Dunno, I'm 20+ years in the industry. It's not easy, though it's just a skill. You can hire a person who would do that for you. It's not necessary to make it look like a wizardry. It's just a skill.

I offer counseling if you're struggling with the basics. For you personally it would be 200% extra though. I don't like unnecessary rude people.

If you think hiring a person to manage this is cheaper than the setup they have, or even remotely reasonable for a volunteer project, then there’s nothing more to discuss.

That is in no way shape or form grounded in reality.

I think I know a bit more about this particular problem than a (senior) software developer. Infra management is my profession, which I've been doing for decades. The conversation might have been more interesting if you hadn't been so rude initially.

This conversation might have been more interesting if your point was anything but "it's easy, trust me bro", which you continue to do.

Waving credentials around and proposing solutions not remotely feasible for the problem at hand generally does not sway people nor provide for interesting discussion.

I don’t owe you anything. I don’t engage in discussions with ignorant jerks. Simple life goals.

Anecdotally, I can report that Steam has significantly less than 99.999% uptime. Friends have reported similar for Xbox and PlayStation services.

At least in the case of Steam, they print money and can still struggle to keep the lights running.

> less than 99.999% uptime

And that's completely fine. Nobody will die if gaming service has donwntime slightly (or considerably) longer than 5 minutes/year.

Totally agree. Just as a point of reference that a professional service with significantly stronger uptime targets fails to meet these unrealistic expectations. For an open source game with volunteer resources, it is not reasonable to expect anything more.

Edit: I would go so far as to say they could even have a weekly “patch Wednesday” where the expectation is set that there would be an hour of downtime.

It's an open source game run by volunteers, played by enthusiasts.

HA is not necessary. Having 5m downtime once every 4 years while they switch between the primary and the backup droplet because something went wrong is okay for a game!

The majority of folks running solutions that result in effectively 0% downtime are vastly overpaying for what they get.

I think the point is that most of those requirements could be met with a $60/month hetzner server containing a 512 GB raid array. I think that comes with 100GB free backup and if you pay another 10 bucks or so you can upgrade to a terabyte. But it's been a while since I checked out those costs.

It doesn't have to be _your_ macbook, it could be someone else's, like a vps somewhere else with a 99.9 uptime. That would be more than enough to serve 150GB of static data + a forum. You don't need to involve amazon and cloudflare for a 90's game.

Note that the forum is a separate entity to the openttd project (though there is some overlap in people), and while openttd is the most commonly played variety these days, was started to discuss TTD and TTDPatch

It does not happen. Just round robin two $10 vps. Have backups of the database.

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