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Comment by ManBeardPc | Hacker News Reader

People seriously underestimate the amount of clients you can serve from a single monolith + SQL database on a VPS or physical hardware. Pretty reliable as well, not many moving parts, simple to understand, fast to setup and keep up to date. Use something like Java, C#, Go or Rust. If you need to scale you can either scale vertically (bigger machines) or horizontally (load-balancer).

The SQL database is probably the hardest part to scale, but depending on your type of app there is a lot of room with optimizing indices or add caching.

In my last company we could easily develop and provide on-call support for multiple production critical deployments with only 3 engineers that way. Got so little calls that I had trouble to remember everything and had to look it up.

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Scaling databases is easy. But you can really blow performance out of the water if you don't know SQL and use an ORM the naive way. Micro services and things like graphql make it worse. Now you are doing joins in memory in your FF-ing graphql endpoint instead of in the database.

A simple cheap database should be able to handle millions of rows and a handful of concurrent users. Meaning that if your users drop by a few times a week, you can have hundreds/thousands of those before your server gets busy. Run two cheap vms so you can do zero downtime deployments. Put a load balancer in front of it. Get a managed database. Grand total should be under 100$ per month. If you are really strapped for cash, you can get away with <40$.

Vertical scaling is easy, but horizontal scaling is something that gets complex very fast for SQL databases. More tools, more setup, more things can go wrong and you have to know. If you have no shard like a tenant_id joins easily become something that involves the network.

Managed databases ofc take a lot of that work away from you, but some customers want or need on-premise solutions due to legal requirements or not wanting to get locked into proprietary offerings.

>And a big, serious database server can handle insane number of rows and concurrent users. Stackoverflow famously runs on [1] a single database server (plus a second for failover, plus another pair for the rest of the stackexchange network).

[1] Or used to run, this factoid is from many years ago, at its peak popularity.

People also underestimate how financially predictable this setup is - you purchase a VPS or bare metal box on DigitalOcean/Hetzner/OVH for e.g. $50/mo, and that price will likely stay the same for the next 5 years. Try that with any of the cloud providers.

This part is often neglected when running a company, where owners usually hope infra costs will decrease over time or remain proportional to company income. However, I'm still waiting to see that.

Good point. Hardware resources are significantly more expensive in the cloud. It is not even close. For basic setups and no insane scaling requirements (most CRUD apps) I don't think you can beat the VPS/bare-metal offers from the mentioned providers. Support is often superb as well.

> The SQL database is probably the hardest part to scale

Use an ORM and SQLite, I bet you a beer that you won’t hit the perf ceiling before getting bored of your project.

I agree that SQLite is awesome for many use-cases. Running in the same process allows to have a very small latency. No additional server to manage is also a big plus. Concurrency can be an issue with writes though. Plus if you need to scale your backend you can't share the same database.

ORMs are very hit-and-miss for me. Had bad experiences with performance issues and colleagues who don't understand SQL itself, leading to many problems. Micro-ORMs that just do the mapping, reduce boilerplate and otherwise get out of your way are great though.

It really depends on the project. For a CRUD application? Sure. For an application that processes hundreds of events per second, stores them, and makes them wueryable using various filters? Can get tough real quick.

That's where SQLite really shines - used it in a massively scaled facial recognition system, with several hundred simultaneous cameras, a very large FR database with over 10K people, each having dozens of face entries, and all the events that generates from live video viewing large public venues. SQLite was never a bottleneck, not at all.

Single sqlite db or did you shard it ?

Single SQLite db embedded within the FR server, with some crazy huge database size of 75+ million faces too. This system is now deployed in a huge percentage of the western world's airports.

Kotlin probably deserves an honorary mention instead of Java.

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