Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

Because OP example is very simplistic and left on the table very important details, you would base 250M on a single machine? What about backups, obervability, how do you update that stack without bringing down everything ... Also this is napkin maths, this could be off by 10 or 100x which would change everything.

It's very simple to make a PoC on a very powerful machine, make it ready from production serving hunderd of millions of users is completely different.

View on HN

It’s worth noting that the author’s example doesn’t do anything like HTTP. It was purely an algorithmic benchmark.

Nobody should be looking at this and thinking that it’s realistic to actually serve a functional website at this scale on a single machine with actual real world requirements.

> What about backups

Several ways of doing this without relying on k8s

> observability

This doesn't require k8s neither and it's more on your app. Systemd can restart systems by itself

> how do you update that stack without bringing down everything

That's probably where redundancy helps the most. I wouldn't run a big service without it (but again it found be at server level)

> but again it found be at server level

Can you educate us on how to have a resilient app with no-downtime updates at the server level.

Because if you're doing this via software then it's no different to Kubernetes.

What I meant there is 2 servers + load balancer in front.

Yeah, k8s might be the easiest way of doing this today if you want only 1 physical server

In addition, you should worry about what happens to your app if a hardware error, network problem or natural disaster makes your machine unavailable.

Heh, also praying that everything stays in the fast path. If a small portion of the workload uses a higher portion of machine resources then the moment an attacker figures it out they have a great way of DDOSing your service resources.

Split the DB from the app and replicate with a load balancer?

Now you have "Production Twitter on three machines". Follow the rabbit and you end up with something like what Twitter looks like today.

That database is going to need to be clustered as well for resiliency.

Sounds like you already have quite a number of different containers already.

Four vms isn’t too bad to manage, I was the first dev at a startup that went prelaunch to acquisition from 2 App/DB servers in EC2 for a mobile app that hit #1 on both stores with a fairly high user tx rate and some ML stuff.

It is a BoE system design. How is it off by 100x?

As well, you should be creating regional servers to minimize latency for folks in other geographic regions. Can't beat c!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com