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Being boring has nothing to do with scale. Some of the biggest applications run on incredibly simple architectures, and often are able to scale so well because

Being boring has nothing to do with scale. Some of the biggest applications run on incredibly simple architectures, and often are able to scale so well because of that (boring) simplicity.

SebJansen 4y ago
Cassandra is probably in the realm 'boring and scalable'
- manigandham 4y ago
  Definitely not. I'd much rather scale Postgres manually through layers of sharding and proxies than handle Cassandra. There is ScyllaDB for a much better reimplementation of Cassandra/Dynamo, but wide-column databases are still best for niche scenarios, especially as RDBMS are rapidly evolving into natively distributed architectures.
endisneigh 4y ago
What are the biggest apps on the simplest architectures and what are the architectures?
- fabian2k 4y ago
  Stack Overflow is probably one of the more public examples. That is mostly a C# monolith with a relational database behind it.
- manigandham 4y ago
  Monolithic apps running on big servers talking to databases running on big servers. Very little orchestration overhead or complexity with serverless and the rest. Everything from StackOverflow to ad serving systems to high-frequency trading exchanges are run this way.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Stack overflow is unique in that it’s most read only. Link to high frequency trading “boring” architecture?
    - manigandham 4y ago
      What is your definition of non-boring architecture? I'm curious as to what you consider the exciting architectures necessary for scaling to make sure we're talking about the same thing. Quora, Pinterest, Twitter, etc are all just big app instances talking to DB instances, with separate systems for background processing, queues, and caching. Are you suggesting that they would scale better with serverless functions instead? Here's a list of architectures: http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/ http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/
      - leetbulb 4y ago
        Ironic that this page is down? (also not https? heh)
      - endisneigh 4y ago
        I do not consider any of your examples really that simple or boring. Boring to me is a load balancer, app server and cache. Once you start talking about background jobs and queues I don’t see how that’s any simpler than the alternative. You could say Google, running Borg, is basically a database with a bunch of load balancers and background job processors. Obviously the complexity is in the scale and implementation.

Being boring has nothing to do with scale. Some of the biggest applications run on incredibly simple architectures, and often are able to scale so well because of that (boring) simplicity.

SebJansen 4y ago

Cassandra is probably in the realm 'boring and scalable'

manigandham 4y ago
Definitely not. I'd much rather scale Postgres manually through layers of sharding and proxies than handle Cassandra. There is ScyllaDB for a much better reimplementation of Cassandra/Dynamo, but wide-column databases are still best for niche scenarios, especially as RDBMS are rapidly evolving into natively distributed architectures.

endisneigh 4y ago

What are the biggest apps on the simplest architectures and what are the architectures?

fabian2k 4y ago
Stack Overflow is probably one of the more public examples. That is mostly a C# monolith with a relational database behind it.
manigandham 4y ago
Monolithic apps running on big servers talking to databases running on big servers. Very little orchestration overhead or complexity with serverless and the rest. Everything from StackOverflow to ad serving systems to high-frequency trading exchanges are run this way.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Stack overflow is unique in that it’s most read only. Link to high frequency trading “boring” architecture?
  - manigandham 4y ago
    What is your definition of non-boring architecture? I'm curious as to what you consider the exciting architectures necessary for scaling to make sure we're talking about the same thing. Quora, Pinterest, Twitter, etc are all just big app instances talking to DB instances, with separate systems for background processing, queues, and caching. Are you suggesting that they would scale better with serverless functions instead? Here's a list of architectures: http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/ http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/
    - leetbulb 4y ago
      Ironic that this page is down? (also not https? heh)
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      I do not consider any of your examples really that simple or boring. Boring to me is a load balancer, app server and cache. Once you start talking about background jobs and queues I don’t see how that’s any simpler than the alternative. You could say Google, running Borg, is basically a database with a bunch of load balancers and background job processors. Obviously the complexity is in the scale and implementation.