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It actually doesn't have to. Serving a static site on S3 can make you hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course thats because you put a metamask plugin and ca

It actually doesn't have to. Serving a static site on S3 can make you hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course thats because you put a metamask plugin and cater to crypto people and don't even have to build a backend to do anything impressive there. But its scalable enough!

busterarm 6y ago
I built a static site served by S3 & cheap Lightsail boxes that serves a $5B/yr business. That was 4 years ago and beyond basic patching they've barely touched their infrastructure and it runs around $100/mo.
- Railsify 6y ago
  This use case is about where AWS cost effective scalability ends, anything more complicated and you are into multiple thousands a month for a redundant solution for a critical web-app with a database. We used to run prod and stage envs in aws but as our stage environment grew we realized we could on-prem some pretty bad-a* hardware for the cost of a few months AWS billing. Now we run prod on aws, staging and dev locally.
  - murukesh_s 6y ago
    Second that.. and hardest thing is you don't really know where you are getting charged. i mean you can look at the billing but boy they do add up to 1000s before you know and you are so hooked into auto scaling, s3, rds with multi-az what not..
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    There's a cost maintaining a staging environment on-prem while prod is on a cloud. Slightly different versions of databases, different networking, etc... It could create issues. This does depend on how much you buy into the AWS ecosystem, if it's strictly EC2-only it's not as much of a problem. Not that I wouldn't do it, a lot of times it does make financial sense.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    You don't exactly need to tell me. I have 10^4 machines in multiple clouds right now plus more n datacenters. Cost effective scaling is hard, but you have to design your applications around it. Tbh, I find most engineering orgs don't have the competency to pull it off.
- codegeek 6y ago
  "that serves a $5B/yr business." Ok but is that static site primarily generating the $5B in revenue ? That's more relevant to know. Having a static site for a business where the revenue is generated elsewhere is not that big of a deal in my opinion. Yes I get your point that the $5B company is hosting a static site on S3 which is cool but what will be cooler is if THAT static site is the primary revenue driver. I bet it isn't.
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    I tried to imagine what kind of website could generate $5B without requiring more than $100/month of hardware. Seems impossible.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Just take a look at the top 10 adwords keywords and let your mind wander. Our business touched 4 out of 10...
      - monsieurbanana 6y ago
        Found in a random blog post, top 10 keywords: - Insurance - Loans - Mortgage - Attorney - Credit - Lawyer - Donate - Degree - Hosting - Claim Still can't see it. But just to be sure, you're saying that the $100/month website was directly generating most of that $5B? And not, for example, being just a bridge between users and an army of attorneys?
        busterarm 6y ago
        Qualified leads are king in that business. Keep in mind that a large number of law firms in this space do not try cases and just generate and sell leads. Yes, obviously there's a lot more that goes into it, but my point was that websites can be extremely simple in their infrastructure and still be extremely effective.
  - busterarm 6y ago
lhorie 6y ago
Fun trivia: for the longest time, lichess.org - which by any measure is a high traffic, hugely interactive web app - was run on... a single server with 8 CPUs and 24Gb RAM[0] [0] https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/hardware-of-lichess-server https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/hardware-of-liche...
- tkinom 6y ago
  Agree! One can still Keep It Simple and Stupid (KISS). Our latest MVP - https://www.code-scope.com https://www.code-scope.com lets one interactively analyze and document GBs of source such as linux kernel. It runs on Digital Ocean's $5 instance, build just with Jquery - bootstrap4. The app binary that runs code-scope.com website is < 10MB including all the frontend and backend code. Good old tech such as jquery works very well for us. Complex js front-end tooling is a choice, not a requirement for develop web app.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    KISS remains one of the most under-appreciated principles out there. I still annoy people by talking about my time at the high frequency trading firm, because working there was a revelatory experience. They were operating at a scale and velocity far beyond any place I've worked at, with lower tolerance for downtime, and very little hardware, relatively speaking. The traders had fun, of course, but it was frankly kind of boring to work there as a techie, what with everything ticking along so smoothly all the time. And the way they got there was through an absolutely fanatical devotion to the KISS principle.
    - nefitty 6y ago
      Do you happen to know of any best practices guides that might help others achieve similar results? I’m working on an app that might have to scale very quickly at launch, and I want to do my best to help our team do it right.
      - devlopr 6y ago

busterarm 6y ago

I built a static site served by S3 & cheap Lightsail boxes that serves a $5B/yr business. That was 4 years ago and beyond basic patching they've barely touched their infrastructure and it runs around $100/mo.

Railsify 6y ago
This use case is about where AWS cost effective scalability ends, anything more complicated and you are into multiple thousands a month for a redundant solution for a critical web-app with a database. We used to run prod and stage envs in aws but as our stage environment grew we realized we could on-prem some pretty bad-a* hardware for the cost of a few months AWS billing. Now we run prod on aws, staging and dev locally.
- murukesh_s 6y ago
  Second that.. and hardest thing is you don't really know where you are getting charged. i mean you can look at the billing but boy they do add up to 1000s before you know and you are so hooked into auto scaling, s3, rds with multi-az what not..
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  There's a cost maintaining a staging environment on-prem while prod is on a cloud. Slightly different versions of databases, different networking, etc... It could create issues. This does depend on how much you buy into the AWS ecosystem, if it's strictly EC2-only it's not as much of a problem. Not that I wouldn't do it, a lot of times it does make financial sense.
- busterarm 6y ago
  You don't exactly need to tell me. I have 10^4 machines in multiple clouds right now plus more n datacenters. Cost effective scaling is hard, but you have to design your applications around it. Tbh, I find most engineering orgs don't have the competency to pull it off.
codegeek 6y ago
"that serves a $5B/yr business." Ok but is that static site primarily generating the $5B in revenue ? That's more relevant to know. Having a static site for a business where the revenue is generated elsewhere is not that big of a deal in my opinion. Yes I get your point that the $5B company is hosting a static site on S3 which is cool but what will be cooler is if THAT static site is the primary revenue driver. I bet it isn't.
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  I tried to imagine what kind of website could generate $5B without requiring more than $100/month of hardware. Seems impossible.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Just take a look at the top 10 adwords keywords and let your mind wander. Our business touched 4 out of 10...
    - monsieurbanana 6y ago
      Found in a random blog post, top 10 keywords: - Insurance - Loans - Mortgage - Attorney - Credit - Lawyer - Donate - Degree - Hosting - Claim Still can't see it. But just to be sure, you're saying that the $100/month website was directly generating most of that $5B? And not, for example, being just a bridge between users and an army of attorneys?
      - busterarm 6y ago
        Qualified leads are king in that business. Keep in mind that a large number of law firms in this space do not try cases and just generate and sell leads. Yes, obviously there's a lot more that goes into it, but my point was that websites can be extremely simple in their infrastructure and still be extremely effective.
- busterarm 6y ago

lhorie 6y ago

Fun trivia: for the longest time, lichess.org - which by any measure is a high traffic, hugely interactive web app - was run on... a single server with 8 CPUs and 24Gb RAM[0] [0] https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/hardware-of-lichess-server https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/hardware-of-liche...

tkinom 6y ago
Agree! One can still Keep It Simple and Stupid (KISS). Our latest MVP - https://www.code-scope.com https://www.code-scope.com lets one interactively analyze and document GBs of source such as linux kernel. It runs on Digital Ocean's $5 instance, build just with Jquery - bootstrap4. The app binary that runs code-scope.com website is < 10MB including all the frontend and backend code. Good old tech such as jquery works very well for us. Complex js front-end tooling is a choice, not a requirement for develop web app.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  KISS remains one of the most under-appreciated principles out there. I still annoy people by talking about my time at the high frequency trading firm, because working there was a revelatory experience. They were operating at a scale and velocity far beyond any place I've worked at, with lower tolerance for downtime, and very little hardware, relatively speaking. The traders had fun, of course, but it was frankly kind of boring to work there as a techie, what with everything ticking along so smoothly all the time. And the way they got there was through an absolutely fanatical devotion to the KISS principle.
  - nefitty 6y ago
    Do you happen to know of any best practices guides that might help others achieve similar results? I’m working on an app that might have to scale very quickly at launch, and I want to do my best to help our team do it right.
    - devlopr 6y ago