Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised to read how much money companies are willing to spend on things that can be done for essentially nothing.

I had a look at the site - why does this need to run on a major cloud provider at all? Why use VERY expensive cloud storage at 9 cents per gigabyte? Why use very expensive image conversion at $50/month when you can run sharp on a Linux server?

I shouldn't be surprised - the world is all in on very expensive cloud computing.

There's another way though assuming you are running something fairly "normal" (whatever that means) - run your own Linux servers. Serve data from those Linux computers. I use CloudFlare R2 to serve your files - its free. You probably don't need most of your fancy architecture - run a fast server on Ionos or Hetzner or something and stop angsting about budget alerts from Google for things that should be free and runnong on your own computers - simple,. straightforward and without IAM spaghetti and all that garbage.

EDIT: I just had a look at the architecture diagram - this is overarchitected. This is a single server application that almost has no architecture - Caddy as a web server - a local queue - serve images from R2 - should be running on a single machine on a host that charges nothing or trivial amount for data.

Don't use cloud, use these two other clouds. This right here is the issue, the skills and know how to buy hardware, install it in a data center, and get it on the internet are niche beyond niche.

Entering the world where you're dealing with Cogent, your Dell and Fortinet reps, suddenly having strong opinions about iDRAC vs iLO and hardware RAID is well beyond what anyone wants to care about just to run some web servers.

When people talk about major cloud providers being expensive the alternative is never /really/ to do it yourself but move to a discount hosting provider. And it's not as if there isn't savings to be found there but it's just another form of cloud optimization. We're talking about a story where $100 of spend triggers an alert. The difference is so minuscule.

I have read this argument before. Of cause you can do everything yourself _but it is not free_

You are missing both development cost and much more importantly opportunity cost

If I spent a person year on a cheap run architecture while my competitor spent a person year on a value add feature add, he will win

Depends on what skills you have, but running everything on a single machine rather than messing with multiple cloud services can also be cheaper in development cost.

If you're able to do that, then you have a huge skill! I'm not much of a devops engineer myself, so I'm leveraging work done by others. My skills are in application design. For hosting I try to rely on what others have built and host there.

If I had your skills then our costs would be much smaller. As it stands now we pay about $700/month for everything - the bulk of it for a 16gb ram / 512gb space database.

How much does it cost to have an ISP let you do that? What are the barriers generally?

Let you do what? What barriers do you see?

> run your own Linux servers

He might have thought it meant running servers on a home network instead of managing remote Linux servers.

If you're referring to hosting on a home network, you'll probably be behind CGNAT. Your ISP can give you a dedicated IP but it'll most likely cost something.

> I use CloudFlare R2 to serve your files - its free.

I mean technically it's not free. It's just that they have a very generous "Forever Free" number of read operations (10M/month, $0.36 per million after).

Looks like a site you could build in WordPress with some custom plugins like ACF and host on a single VPS for the most part.

yeah, as a crotchety old unix guy, 10k requests a second was a benchmark 30 years ago on an actual server

today a raspberry pi 5 can do 50k/s with TLS no sweat

Can you give me an example of how to do 50k/s with TLS on an rpi? Also what do you use to measure that?

I've tried a little with httpd (apache) on an older desktop I use as my home server and got terrible results. I can't remember but it might have been single digit or low double digit rps.

try with caddy

Based on these benchmark numbers, 50k/s seems plausible (not sure about the no sweat bit though ;-)): https://www.wolfssl.com/wolfssl-on-pi5-benchmarks/

Also found this bit:

> But second, the new Broadcom SOC finally supports the ARM cryptography extensions, which make it 45x faster at AES, for instance. With TLS almost everywhere, this keeps crypto performance from becoming the bottleneck. Nice.

(https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-t...)

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