3 ms·

I keep hearing this argument against using your own infrastructure again and again, and I'm not sure how true it is. I've worked with teams on both sides, and

I keep hearing this argument against using your own infrastructure again and again, and I'm not sure how true it is. I've worked with teams on both sides, and everyone is gonna have to deal with figuring out how to run at scale, it's just different ways of achieving that. I've worked with teams that manage their own infrastructure with dedicated servers, and not having to think about scaling for a long time as the one beefy server could just take whatever load you threw at it. I've also worked with teams who don't manage their own infrastructure and thought they were ready to scale without issues, but once the scale actually happened, it turned out there was more things to consider than just the amount of servers you run, race-conditions were everywhere but no one thought about that. Definitely a case of "right tool for the right job", but I don't think it's as easy as "Self-managed: harder to scale, PaaS/Cloud: easy peazy to scale".

Dave3of5 5y ago
Yeah agreed I haven't worked with Google scale companies but I've always found scaling issue to to development related not infrastructure related. So examples would be a bad db query that takes the system down, overly chatting webserver that issues too many queries to the backend, pulling large datasets into the webapp causing exhaustion of memory ...etc. AWS / Azure can't be these issues they have to be fixed in your code. There is definitely a place for AWS/Azure and their offering of services is fantastic but they are not a silver bullet for scaling your website to millions of active user. On another point though the vast majority of websites you'll ever build won't have that level of active users. It's a good problem to have though as it means your site is doing really well.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  > I've always found scaling issue to to development related not infrastructure related. So examples would be a bad db query that takes the system down, overly chatting webserver that issues too many queries to the backend This is actually one of the strengths of the cloud, startups that can't afford talent throw compute resources at the problem. Running your own servers isn't hard per se, but it requires a certain breadth of less centrally documented knowledge than the cloud and a willingness to fuss. Developers like that can often command higher prices than most startups pay these days :)
  - dijit 5y ago
    Having someone with good cloud chops is still a difficult ask. Putting it all on the devs is exactly how you end up in the haveibeenpwned database and on the cover of magazines (for the wrong reasons). We’ve traded sysadmins for more expensive DevOps. I would love to see a study on if we actually hire less people than if we just did it the old school ways.

Dave3of5 5y ago

Yeah agreed I haven't worked with Google scale companies but I've always found scaling issue to to development related not infrastructure related. So examples would be a bad db query that takes the system down, overly chatting webserver that issues too many queries to the backend, pulling large datasets into the webapp causing exhaustion of memory ...etc. AWS / Azure can't be these issues they have to be fixed in your code. There is definitely a place for AWS/Azure and their offering of services is fantastic but they are not a silver bullet for scaling your website to millions of active user. On another point though the vast majority of websites you'll ever build won't have that level of active users. It's a good problem to have though as it means your site is doing really well.

Hermitian909 5y ago
> I've always found scaling issue to to development related not infrastructure related. So examples would be a bad db query that takes the system down, overly chatting webserver that issues too many queries to the backend This is actually one of the strengths of the cloud, startups that can't afford talent throw compute resources at the problem. Running your own servers isn't hard per se, but it requires a certain breadth of less centrally documented knowledge than the cloud and a willingness to fuss. Developers like that can often command higher prices than most startups pay these days :)
- dijit 5y ago
  Having someone with good cloud chops is still a difficult ask. Putting it all on the devs is exactly how you end up in the haveibeenpwned database and on the cover of magazines (for the wrong reasons). We’ve traded sysadmins for more expensive DevOps. I would love to see a study on if we actually hire less people than if we just did it the old school ways.