5 ms·
So this is where 12factor comes in - unless the application is operating at lower than layer 7 (and with some of the newer offerings even layer 3) there’s not m
by sudhirj 6y ago
So this is where 12factor comes in - unless the application is operating at lower than layer 7 (and with some of the newer offerings even layer 3) there’s not much technology centric stuff going on. Everything Slack is doing is happening at the HTTP / gRPC / Websocket level, and it’s hard to make the case for self managed hosting.
The idea of requests going to an application server on a TCP or HTTP connection with the application server being able to access a database or datastore is now common enough for all the PaaS providers to have abstractions for it, with the load balancing and database/data stores being managed. If customers aren’t happy with the auto scaling logic that can be overridden, but it seems like everything else is pretty rock solid.
Slack’s USP isn’t to reinvent load balancing, distributed configuration or database management, so if I was running it and had a clean slate a PaaS seems like a better bet.
- iampims 6y agoIf I had To guess, I’d say that Slack’s infrastructure footprint is probably as big if not bigger than any popular PaaS.
- codonaut 6y agoThat seems... Questionable.
- johannes1234321 6y agoQuestion on how they measure - I'm in 7 slack workspaces. Do I count 7 times?
- clemParis 6y agoWell, I have to create a new account every time I join a new group, so I'd say yes.
- johannes1234321 6y agoTwo if my workspaces are tied to the same enterprise account, they should be the same, but who knows how they measure. My base assumption is "in a way giving nicer numbers"
- ahupp 6y agoSlack had 12m DAU at the end of last year.
- waprin 6y agoSnapchat runs on App Engine (and other stuff runs on App Engine too) so App Engine is almost certainly bigger than Slack just based on that.