4 ms·

While the naysayers will say, "Why isn't this in the cloud?," I think the response times and uptime of hackernews is really impressive. If anyone has a write-up

While the naysayers will say, "Why isn't this in the cloud?," I think the response times and uptime of hackernews is really impressive. If anyone has a write-up of the infrastructure that runs HN, I would be interested. Maybe startups really can be run off of a rasberry pi

pyb 4y ago
AWS has had more outages than HN in recent times
- mpyne 4y ago
  AWS also operates at a significantly larger scale. When was the last AWS outage due to two critical disks failing at the same time?
  - hosteur 4y ago
    Failures due to increasing complexity are still failures.
    - mpyne 4y ago
      Sure, but you're talking about all of AWS as if every customer is impacted when any part of AWS suffers a failure. But that's not the case, which makes it quite an apples/oranges comparison. But even comparing the apples to the oranges, this HN status page someone else pointed out https://hn.hund.io/ https://hn.hund.io/ seems to show that HN has had more than one outage in just the past month. All but today's and last night's being quite short, but still. Sometimes you need some extra complexity if you want to make it to zero downtime overall. That's not something the HN website needs but I think AWS is doing fine even if that's your point of comparison.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fartcannon 4y ago
  Agree. Same with places like github.
- qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
  Brief AWS outages were limited to us-east-1 where they appear to deploy canary builds and I think they quickly learned from those missteps. OTOH I receive almost weekly emails on my oracle cloud instance connectivity being down. I don’t even understand who their customers are that can tolerate frequent outage Edit - HN is on AWS now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571
tpmx 4y ago
It seems like it is in the cloud (AWS) now. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027091.
NKosmatos 4y ago
If I was (re)designing this, I would keep the existing bare metal server but I would also put in place double (or triple) cloud redundancy/failover. We all love HN so much that it should have zero downtime :-)
lambda_dn 4y ago
HN was down for hours, no website hosted properly using cloud providers is down for more than a few minutes a year. It's trivial to set up multiple providers, multiple regions. Rather than having a few servers with some admin guy swapping out disks, really embarrassing for a so called tech site.
- coryrc 4y ago
  Hope you get a refund
clepto 4y ago
I made the comment that some of our web portals could run off of a raspberry pi perfectly fine, and I wasn’t necessarily suggesting we go do that, but merely trying to get the point across that we don’t need 700 interweaved AWS systems to do what a single host with Apache + Postgres has been doing fine for years.

pyb 4y ago

AWS has had more outages than HN in recent times

mpyne 4y ago
AWS also operates at a significantly larger scale. When was the last AWS outage due to two critical disks failing at the same time?
- hosteur 4y ago
  Failures due to increasing complexity are still failures.
  - mpyne 4y ago
    Sure, but you're talking about all of AWS as if every customer is impacted when any part of AWS suffers a failure. But that's not the case, which makes it quite an apples/oranges comparison. But even comparing the apples to the oranges, this HN status page someone else pointed out https://hn.hund.io/ https://hn.hund.io/ seems to show that HN has had more than one outage in just the past month. All but today's and last night's being quite short, but still. Sometimes you need some extra complexity if you want to make it to zero downtime overall. That's not something the HN website needs but I think AWS is doing fine even if that's your point of comparison.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fartcannon 4y ago
Agree. Same with places like github.
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
Brief AWS outages were limited to us-east-1 where they appear to deploy canary builds and I think they quickly learned from those missteps. OTOH I receive almost weekly emails on my oracle cloud instance connectivity being down. I don’t even understand who their customers are that can tolerate frequent outage Edit - HN is on AWS now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571

tpmx 4y ago

It seems like it is in the cloud (AWS) now. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027091.

NKosmatos 4y ago

If I was (re)designing this, I would keep the existing bare metal server but I would also put in place double (or triple) cloud redundancy/failover. We all love HN so much that it should have zero downtime :-)

lambda_dn 4y ago

HN was down for hours, no website hosted properly using cloud providers is down for more than a few minutes a year. It's trivial to set up multiple providers, multiple regions. Rather than having a few servers with some admin guy swapping out disks, really embarrassing for a so called tech site.

coryrc 4y ago
Hope you get a refund

clepto 4y ago

I made the comment that some of our web portals could run off of a raspberry pi perfectly fine, and I wasn’t necessarily suggesting we go do that, but merely trying to get the point across that we don’t need 700 interweaved AWS systems to do what a single host with Apache + Postgres has been doing fine for years.