5 ms·

I simply cannot understand why people care about "fast" anymore with cheap containerization, CI/CD infra and no more dedicated servers. Who cares if its fast? J

I simply cannot understand why people care about "fast" anymore with cheap containerization, CI/CD infra and no more dedicated servers. Who cares if its fast? Just add another box. I have this suspicion that anyone who still cares about backend speeds is stuck in the vertical scaling mindset where they need to keep adding cores and processes to a single machine

coldtea 5y ago
>I simply cannot understand why people care about "fast" anymore with cheap containerization, CI/CD infra and no more dedicated servers. Who cares if its fast? People who pay for those extra boxes? Not everybody has your budget (especially when they're building things themselves, on the side, so they aren't even paid).
- montblanc 5y ago
  Getting to that scale on the side is a nice problem to have. Maybe it shouldn't be on the side anymore.
- proxyon 5y ago
  A cheap micro container is $5 a month. A cheap dedicated server can be had for $20 a month. Budget is not the issue here.
  - true_religion 5y ago
    An expensive dedicated server can also be had for $1300 a month. Scaling vertically can take you a long long way before you actually have to start separating services.
    - proxyon 5y ago
      Ok? That's a non sequitur. No one is forcing you to buy a dedicated server for $1300 a month which probably has the same performance as $250 worth of separate boxes. And separating services isn't what we're talking about here. It's adding horizontal processes across machines instead of on one machine.
cultofmetatron 5y ago
Not everything scales horizontally. Your database for instance is going to be scaled vertically to its max long before you think about using federated write servers. Sure you can use planetscale but that comes with its own considerations and tradeoffs. Also, higher performance translates to lower machine costs. Our server costs would easily be 4x if we ran rails. given that elixir is 80-90% as productive for writing code in the short term, its a fair deal. Over the long term, we've found elixir to be more maintainable since there's very little magic and the immutable data structures and lack of magic make it super easy to debug. Thanks to the performance of our system, we've also managed to get by without setting up caching. (we'll probably need it eventually but our performance gains have come mostly though fine tuning our sql queries. Ecto gives us way better control over the output sql than active record or sequalize)
montblanc 5y ago
A lot of engineers take great pride in improving performance even if it's mostly meaningless to the company. The users don't really care if the number of instances went down from 30 to 20. It is what it is, engineers will be engineers.
manmal 5y ago
Doesn’t „fast“ directly translate into shorter page loading times? Static pages (JAMStack) load so fast it’s delightful everytime.
- proxyon 5y ago
  It doesn't. They mean "fast" as in one box can handle more load which in their opinion is cheaper because you don't need to containerize and horizontally scale. I find that unlikely.

coldtea 5y ago

>I simply cannot understand why people care about "fast" anymore with cheap containerization, CI/CD infra and no more dedicated servers. Who cares if its fast? People who pay for those extra boxes? Not everybody has your budget (especially when they're building things themselves, on the side, so they aren't even paid).

montblanc 5y ago
Getting to that scale on the side is a nice problem to have. Maybe it shouldn't be on the side anymore.
proxyon 5y ago
A cheap micro container is $5 a month. A cheap dedicated server can be had for $20 a month. Budget is not the issue here.
- true_religion 5y ago
  An expensive dedicated server can also be had for $1300 a month. Scaling vertically can take you a long long way before you actually have to start separating services.
  - proxyon 5y ago
    Ok? That's a non sequitur. No one is forcing you to buy a dedicated server for $1300 a month which probably has the same performance as $250 worth of separate boxes. And separating services isn't what we're talking about here. It's adding horizontal processes across machines instead of on one machine.

cultofmetatron 5y ago

Not everything scales horizontally. Your database for instance is going to be scaled vertically to its max long before you think about using federated write servers. Sure you can use planetscale but that comes with its own considerations and tradeoffs. Also, higher performance translates to lower machine costs. Our server costs would easily be 4x if we ran rails. given that elixir is 80-90% as productive for writing code in the short term, its a fair deal. Over the long term, we've found elixir to be more maintainable since there's very little magic and the immutable data structures and lack of magic make it super easy to debug. Thanks to the performance of our system, we've also managed to get by without setting up caching. (we'll probably need it eventually but our performance gains have come mostly though fine tuning our sql queries. Ecto gives us way better control over the output sql than active record or sequalize)

montblanc 5y ago

A lot of engineers take great pride in improving performance even if it's mostly meaningless to the company. The users don't really care if the number of instances went down from 30 to 20. It is what it is, engineers will be engineers.

manmal 5y ago

Doesn’t „fast“ directly translate into shorter page loading times? Static pages (JAMStack) load so fast it’s delightful everytime.

proxyon 5y ago
It doesn't. They mean "fast" as in one box can handle more load which in their opinion is cheaper because you don't need to containerize and horizontally scale. I find that unlikely.