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> But scalable web services are, in 2022, a commodity available to all. A quick aside - I feel most folks on HN can say that they have been, in some way, shape

> But scalable web services are, in 2022, a commodity available to all. A quick aside - I feel most folks on HN can say that they have been, in some way, shape, or form, a part of this journey for the industry. Take pride in being part of a community that has made this a possibility.

tonymet 5y ago
"scalable" is just a euphemism for inefficient. With the hardware available today, 8m reads / day is easily served on 1 small instance. Until we measure our services in transactions / kW, things will continue to get more redundant.
- switchbak 5y ago
  Power efficiency is definitely a concern at places like Google. Hopefully it'll catch on more, and encourage the use of productive AND efficient approaches.
  - tonymet 5y ago
    it’s a concern for anyone with “engineer” in their title
    - asutekku 5y ago
      Theoretically yes, in reality sadly no.
  - astrange 5y ago
    It's a concern for people who can't afford their power bills. It's not really a concern for Google, who have infinite money and could save power by not running 20 different messenger services if they really wanted to.
- orf 5y ago
  Is it power efficient to have 1 (small|medium|large) instance per workload? Or more realistically >=2 instances for redundancy. No? Maybe we could get cost, energy and other efficiencies by aggregating disparate smaller and larger workloads over a system that scales up and down with demand, so every instance is processing X million TPS. Cool idea. We could label that scalable, because it’s vastly more efficient!
- newtwilly 5y ago
  Is there anything in the article or the supposed architecture that leads you to believe it is inefficient? Might we suspect that using multi-tenant cloud resources may take advantage of economies of scale and be quite efficient?
  - tonymet 5y ago
    CDN, LB, Api gateway, message queue – all distinctly hosted. And that's just the superficial components.

tonymet 5y ago

"scalable" is just a euphemism for inefficient. With the hardware available today, 8m reads / day is easily served on 1 small instance. Until we measure our services in transactions / kW, things will continue to get more redundant.

switchbak 5y ago
Power efficiency is definitely a concern at places like Google. Hopefully it'll catch on more, and encourage the use of productive AND efficient approaches.
- tonymet 5y ago
  it’s a concern for anyone with “engineer” in their title
  - asutekku 5y ago
    Theoretically yes, in reality sadly no.
- astrange 5y ago
  It's a concern for people who can't afford their power bills. It's not really a concern for Google, who have infinite money and could save power by not running 20 different messenger services if they really wanted to.
orf 5y ago
Is it power efficient to have 1 (small|medium|large) instance per workload? Or more realistically >=2 instances for redundancy. No? Maybe we could get cost, energy and other efficiencies by aggregating disparate smaller and larger workloads over a system that scales up and down with demand, so every instance is processing X million TPS. Cool idea. We could label that scalable, because it’s vastly more efficient!
newtwilly 5y ago
Is there anything in the article or the supposed architecture that leads you to believe it is inefficient? Might we suspect that using multi-tenant cloud resources may take advantage of economies of scale and be quite efficient?
- tonymet 5y ago
  CDN, LB, Api gateway, message queue – all distinctly hosted. And that's just the superficial components.