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Yes exactly. I have a an app with about 1m concurrent users at peak hours. For years it is running perfectly fine on a single 8 core machine. Linux - > Nginx ->

Yes exactly. I have a an app with about 1m concurrent users at peak hours. For years it is running perfectly fine on a single 8 core machine. Linux - > Nginx -> memcache -> nodejs -> filesystem. Yes filesystem. All content is fetched from files. Another process is populating all files. I pay 40 dollars/m for this self managed machine.

mwcampbell 7y ago
What do you do when that one machine goes offline? Say there's a power outage, or a networking issue, or you have to reboot with a patched kernel. Now your 1M concurrent users can't use your application. This is why we go to the trouble to use multiple machines, ideally in multiple availability zones if we're using one of the big three cloud providers.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  That could be solved by mirroring the system to another $40/mo machine in another data center. Redundancy was around long before cloud compute was a thing.
- zrobotics 7y ago
  What is wrong in this case w/ multiple VPS's? For instance, I run a shipping system that our entire operation depends on. I can't afford downtime either, as that would shutdown our entire shipping department. However, 1 server running on-prem, 1 remote in shared hosting and 2 failover servers on DigitalOcean costs ~$120/month. What would a managed cloud like AWS or Azure provide besides higher expenses? Last I checked, AWS would be ~$550/month based on their calculator. IT departments managed redundancy long before cloud was a thing, and it's certainly possible to achieve acceptable uptime without the managed services. I realize that I still rely on DO for their uptime, and I'm pricing renting rackspace for that reason. However, uptime is currently within acceptable levels (ie I haven't had to explain to the CEO why all his employees are standing around). We had tried 2 SaaS vendors before our current on-prem solution, and both had had downtime that cost us money. Both were hosted in AWS, so clearly that isn't the panacea for ultimate reliability. If our on-prem server goes down, I get a call. However, I got calls when our SaaS vendor went down as well; sitting on line with their tech support wasn't any great comfort. The same graceful failover processes are accessible on machines you control, there's no reason that you have to run on one machine if you avoid the cloud. The biggest hurdle for me to implement this was database concurrency with multiple servers, but a cloud solution wouldn't have done anything to solve that problem. [edit:] typos and miss-typed AWS pricing due to mobile keyboard.
- Kiro 7y ago
  I tell the users to try later. Not every app needs a SLA.

mwcampbell 7y ago

What do you do when that one machine goes offline? Say there's a power outage, or a networking issue, or you have to reboot with a patched kernel. Now your 1M concurrent users can't use your application. This is why we go to the trouble to use multiple machines, ideally in multiple availability zones if we're using one of the big three cloud providers.

jjeaff 7y ago
That could be solved by mirroring the system to another $40/mo machine in another data center. Redundancy was around long before cloud compute was a thing.
zrobotics 7y ago
What is wrong in this case w/ multiple VPS's? For instance, I run a shipping system that our entire operation depends on. I can't afford downtime either, as that would shutdown our entire shipping department. However, 1 server running on-prem, 1 remote in shared hosting and 2 failover servers on DigitalOcean costs ~$120/month. What would a managed cloud like AWS or Azure provide besides higher expenses? Last I checked, AWS would be ~$550/month based on their calculator. IT departments managed redundancy long before cloud was a thing, and it's certainly possible to achieve acceptable uptime without the managed services. I realize that I still rely on DO for their uptime, and I'm pricing renting rackspace for that reason. However, uptime is currently within acceptable levels (ie I haven't had to explain to the CEO why all his employees are standing around). We had tried 2 SaaS vendors before our current on-prem solution, and both had had downtime that cost us money. Both were hosted in AWS, so clearly that isn't the panacea for ultimate reliability. If our on-prem server goes down, I get a call. However, I got calls when our SaaS vendor went down as well; sitting on line with their tech support wasn't any great comfort. The same graceful failover processes are accessible on machines you control, there's no reason that you have to run on one machine if you avoid the cloud. The biggest hurdle for me to implement this was database concurrency with multiple servers, but a cloud solution wouldn't have done anything to solve that problem. [edit:] typos and miss-typed AWS pricing due to mobile keyboard.
Kiro 7y ago
I tell the users to try later. Not every app needs a SLA.