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Comment by phildenhoff | Hacker News Reader

Right but there are all those layers so that HNs one server can service your request and send a response.

How much traffic would be generated if, for every request to HN, six other requests fire? And every time you comment a cascade of requests fire in HNs imaginary K8s cluster?

It’s not that there is anything wrong with this, or that the tradeoff isn’t worth it… it’s just so much data flying back and forth over the wire.

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Ultimately, in the age of massive cloud compute, the constraining resource in an organization is engineering hours, not CPU/memory/bandwidth. And even then, I've yet to encounter a system (outside of massively parallel MPI-based HPC) where saturating network pipes became the bottleneck for a system before CPU/memory utilization.

Microservice architecture means there's lot of data flying around, but it keeps local resource utilization predictable.

I thought that the constraining resource was money in all but the top 1000 or so businesses in the world with effectively 99%+ margins, mostly because they control their markets absolutely and can raise prices or change demand like the big three algorithmic advertising companies. Everybody else in the cloud goes to the wall without very careful cost control, which is by no means automated or low cost, either.

Most often, the wire is virtual, its just copying bytes between processes.

> so much data flying back and forth over the wire

A mesh doesn't add any extra data back and forth over a wire.

It adds some data being copied from one place in RAM to another place in RAM.

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