4 ms·

I think anyone considering these wild setups should read about how stackowerflow is hosted on a couple of IIS servers. It’s a sobering reminder that you often d

by moksly 7y ago

I think anyone considering these wild setups should read about how stackowerflow is hosted on a couple of IIS servers. It’s a sobering reminder that you often don’t need the new cool.

jiofih 7y ago
Nothing much happens if SO goes down, they are not doing a ton of business transactions.
- fishnchips 7y ago
  Nothing much? The world stops producing software:)
  - sgt 7y ago
    He's got a point though. Ironically the world's most highly scaled software are often fairly unimportant. Think Facebook - people would get annoyed if it went down for a day, but it'd soon be forgotten. Your banks are built with less scalable software but is much more critical.
- pnako 7y ago
  That's right. As opposed to stock exchange software, which runs on complex micro-services cloud k8s thing-as-a-thing virtualized rotozooming engines. Wait, no, it's literally just good-old n-tier architecture with one big server process and some database backend. Pet food delivery startups use k8s to manage their MEAN stack. Meanwhile grown-ups still have "monoliths" connected to something like Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL server, because that's obviously the most reliable setup. The cloud/k8s stuff is an ad-hoc wannabe mainframe built on shaky foundations.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    > Meanwhile grown-ups still have "monoliths" connected to something like Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL server, because that's obviously the most reliable setup. More often than not they just crystalized their 90s knowledge and just pretended there aren't better tools for the job because it would take some work to adopt them and no one notices it in their work anyway. The "Oracle" keyword is a telltale sign.
danielovichdk 7y ago
Joel, if any, has always been super pragmatic and very realistic. Not to misunderstand. For FogBugz they wrote a compiler/transpiler for Asp and PHP because the product had to run on customers servers - because "clients should not leave their private data at another company". Google it, great read.
- tommica 7y ago
  Tried to google for it, couldn't find anything - could you provide a link, please?
  - toyg 7y ago
    For the details on that transpiler: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/03/30/the-road-to-fogbugz-40-part-iii/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/03/30/the-road-to-fogbug... I would recommend going through all of Joel Spolsky’s posts between 2000 and 2010, there are plenty of absolute diamonds. Part of why StackOverflow was so successful was because Joel had built a big audience of geeks and entrepreneurs with his excellent blog posts (he was the Excel PM during the creation of VBA and had plenty of accrued wisdom to share), so they adopted SO almost instantaneously when him and Jeff Atwood built it.
    - 08-15 7y ago
      "“don’t you mean translator?“ Let me explain. In computer science jargon a translator IS a compiler. It’s exactly the same thing. Those are synonyms." Every time someone says "transpiler", god kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.
rumanator 7y ago
> I think anyone considering these wild setups should read about how stackowerflow is hosted on a couple of IIS servers. Apparently in 2019 stack overflow was hosted in at least 25 servers, including 4 servers dedicated to run haproxy. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...

by moksly 7y ago

I think anyone considering these wild setups should read about how stackowerflow is hosted on a couple of IIS servers. It’s a sobering reminder that you often don’t need the new cool.

jiofih 7y ago

Nothing much happens if SO goes down, they are not doing a ton of business transactions.

fishnchips 7y ago
Nothing much? The world stops producing software:)
- sgt 7y ago
  He's got a point though. Ironically the world's most highly scaled software are often fairly unimportant. Think Facebook - people would get annoyed if it went down for a day, but it'd soon be forgotten. Your banks are built with less scalable software but is much more critical.
pnako 7y ago
That's right. As opposed to stock exchange software, which runs on complex micro-services cloud k8s thing-as-a-thing virtualized rotozooming engines. Wait, no, it's literally just good-old n-tier architecture with one big server process and some database backend. Pet food delivery startups use k8s to manage their MEAN stack. Meanwhile grown-ups still have "monoliths" connected to something like Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL server, because that's obviously the most reliable setup. The cloud/k8s stuff is an ad-hoc wannabe mainframe built on shaky foundations.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > Meanwhile grown-ups still have "monoliths" connected to something like Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL server, because that's obviously the most reliable setup. More often than not they just crystalized their 90s knowledge and just pretended there aren't better tools for the job because it would take some work to adopt them and no one notices it in their work anyway. The "Oracle" keyword is a telltale sign.

danielovichdk 7y ago

Joel, if any, has always been super pragmatic and very realistic. Not to misunderstand. For FogBugz they wrote a compiler/transpiler for Asp and PHP because the product had to run on customers servers - because "clients should not leave their private data at another company". Google it, great read.

tommica 7y ago
Tried to google for it, couldn't find anything - could you provide a link, please?
- toyg 7y ago
  For the details on that transpiler: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/03/30/the-road-to-fogbugz-40-part-iii/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/03/30/the-road-to-fogbug... I would recommend going through all of Joel Spolsky’s posts between 2000 and 2010, there are plenty of absolute diamonds. Part of why StackOverflow was so successful was because Joel had built a big audience of geeks and entrepreneurs with his excellent blog posts (he was the Excel PM during the creation of VBA and had plenty of accrued wisdom to share), so they adopted SO almost instantaneously when him and Jeff Atwood built it.
  - 08-15 7y ago
    "“don’t you mean translator?“ Let me explain. In computer science jargon a translator IS a compiler. It’s exactly the same thing. Those are synonyms." Every time someone says "transpiler", god kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.

rumanator 7y ago

> I think anyone considering these wild setups should read about how stackowerflow is hosted on a couple of IIS servers. Apparently in 2019 stack overflow was hosted in at least 25 servers, including 4 servers dedicated to run haproxy. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...