Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

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> Autoscaling is a solution to the self-inflicted problem of insanely-high cloud prices, which cloud providers love because implementing it requires more reliance on proprietary vendor-specific APIs. The actual solution is a handful of modern bare-metal servers at strategic locations which allow you to cover your worst-case expected load while being cheaper than the lowest expected load on a cloud

And how do you predict with certainty your "highest expected load"? And if you're in a space like ecommerce, where you have 1 week out of the year with x10 or x50 the load, I doubt it would actually be cheaper than using autoscaling. Especially today, with the costs of memory and storage. Not to mention that whenever you hit your load maximum, you have a few months of lead time to get extra capacity.

And FYI, "proprietary vendor-specific APIs" sounds very scary, but if you think about it for a few seconds, those APIs end at configuring an autoscaling group which is mostly about your min/max, and scaling rules. Yeah, it's proprietary, but it's 3-4 parameters to configure based on what you need, and from then little if any adjustment is needed. And you can take the same logic and port it to any other cloud provider within ~10 mins at most.

> And how do you predict with certainty your "highest expected load"? And if you're in a space like ecommerce, where you have 1 week out of the year with x10 or x50 the load, I doubt it would actually be cheaper than using autoscaling.

If you know when that week is, where's the problem in spinning up extra capacity just for that period, a week in advance?

Retailers, whether online or not, know with a very high confidence what their expected load is going to be a week from now.

But you have to buy those servers, set them up, use them for that week, and then they're left idle for the whole of the year.

You don’t need to buy them, you can get them from AWS for that period only. Doesn’t mean your whole stack needs to be on AWS.

Doesn't mean, it significantly complicates state. Because the place that stores it (say, your bare metal machine with your database) is now the bottleneck.

None of the autoscaling solutions presented in the post address the database issue either.

I agree that in general the database is always going to be your bottleneck and autoscaling appservers is generally bullshit.

But let’s assume your DB is fine and you do actually need to scale appservers beyond what your provisioned capacity can allow, you can trivially spin up VMs at AWS or your provider of choice, Wireguard to your “VPC” at your bare-metal provider (or just SSH tunnel the ports) and run your appserver binary/container/etc on it.

Hell in a pinch you can do the above with your dev laptop and serve traffic from it. It will work and your customers won’t even be able to tell.

> But you have to buy those servers, set them up, use them for that week, and then they're left idle for the whole of the year.

I didn't say you have to buy them. I said you can spin up extra capacity.

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