4 ms·

But you literally don't have to do any such thing though. A simple make file and maybe a load balancer can easily let you launch large web applications used by

But you literally don't have to do any such thing though. A simple make file and maybe a load balancer can easily let you launch large web applications used by millions of users. I do not understand where people are getting stuck here that they need all of this complexity. How many users do these apps have?

notmypenguin 3y ago
Not only that, half this supposedly necessary tech actually slows you down: containers and kubernetes, websockets galore, clients like giant barnacles on your server, then we get these best practices that weren’t thought out well: sessions, etc… mostly it’s the cargo cult implementation knee jerk response “gotta have it” like some frontend maniac from 2010 adding jquery to everything, when what is needed is to keep the hood open and keep people talking about the engine parts instead of calling it done and schlepping some guys tractor drag race motor around town delivering pizzas
- dotxlem 3y ago
  > instead of calling it done and schlepping some guys tractor drag race motor around town delivering pizzas This sounds way too specific to be a hypothetical
physicsguy 3y ago
Way less than people think they’re going to. When I started my current job, the project was veering into microservices hell by a team that did not understand how to build a web application. A rough back of envelope calculation of potential customer base and what the product was aimed at (B2B in renewables) told me that even with world domination, the backend of the application would at most have 50k active users ever. So we didn’t really need 30 different microservices all which could scale independently, maybe just 2 or 3 larger services.
- namaria 3y ago
  Do you work where I left earlier this year? Exact same description: extremely small total user base, 30~ people company, deploying 30~ services on Kubernetes... I was being asked to take over repositories full of configuration files. No, thanks.
- ep103 3y ago
  Yup, this is what I'm working on right now. 10 microservices to support a 2 page static html webpage. We "needed" microservices for "Scalability", but we will never have more than a few hundred users at a time. We can't have simple logging of our services, because all logs have to go to Loki, and Loki only does full text search. So first, learn how to query with Grafana's querying language in order to do any searches at all, then figure out what you will ever need to search, and turn that into a prometheus metric, but wait, now we have to properly compose our metrics for queryability.... I need to implement retry logic in one of my microservices. Would be easily implementable with an Amazon SQS or RabbitMQ queue. But we can't have queues, because they aren't stateless. We need to use Kafka because it has the ability to scale to billions of events, never mind that we never see more than 10k events in a 24 hour period. So now we'll need to write custom logic for retries and managing state outside of the queue, which means we're back to using database tables, which means there's no point to using kafka to begin with for our application... Our services build in gitlab to docker images which then are hosted in the cloud and managed by k8s in custom vpcs. Sure, makes sense. But also, can someone show me how the developers on the team are supposed to be able to run the system locally? What? Can't do it? Replicating the production environment for local builds is now too heavy a lift and has been deprioritized by management? So how are they supposed to develop again? Oh, they'll just never learn how the whole system works, and continuously make changes they assume are isolated to their specific microservice without realizing they've introduced an error into the wider system unless the lead/manager catch it? Got it. I could go on. Architects choosing technologies over listening to their engineers, in order to pad their resumes with technologies that look good to other architects. Committees of middle-managers choosing the 'safe' enterprise technologies instead of what is actually needed.
  - belmont_sup 3y ago
    I can feel the raw anger and exasperation. Well done.
  - reidjs 3y ago
    Resume based development!
  - collyw 3y ago
paganel 3y ago
> How many users do these apps have? There aren't that many projects that have "millions" of users.
citrin_ru 3y ago
Startup mentality - you preparing to serve 100M users even if you have 1.5 right now and it will be rare luck to have even 1M because if you will not hit high numbers it doomed: high investment will not bring equally high returns and everything will be scrapped.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  100M records is ~ 20 GB database. One of my companies needs to deal with large spikes in traffic coming from sudden virality on Tiktok and it peaks at around 8M users within a day or so. I handle all of that on a single beefy Hetzner machine with cycles to spare.
  - collyw 3y ago
    Stack overflow has very modest requirements considering it's one of the most visited sites on the net. https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance

notmypenguin 3y ago

Not only that, half this supposedly necessary tech actually slows you down: containers and kubernetes, websockets galore, clients like giant barnacles on your server, then we get these best practices that weren’t thought out well: sessions, etc… mostly it’s the cargo cult implementation knee jerk response “gotta have it” like some frontend maniac from 2010 adding jquery to everything, when what is needed is to keep the hood open and keep people talking about the engine parts instead of calling it done and schlepping some guys tractor drag race motor around town delivering pizzas

dotxlem 3y ago
> instead of calling it done and schlepping some guys tractor drag race motor around town delivering pizzas This sounds way too specific to be a hypothetical

physicsguy 3y ago

Way less than people think they’re going to. When I started my current job, the project was veering into microservices hell by a team that did not understand how to build a web application. A rough back of envelope calculation of potential customer base and what the product was aimed at (B2B in renewables) told me that even with world domination, the backend of the application would at most have 50k active users ever. So we didn’t really need 30 different microservices all which could scale independently, maybe just 2 or 3 larger services.

namaria 3y ago
Do you work where I left earlier this year? Exact same description: extremely small total user base, 30~ people company, deploying 30~ services on Kubernetes... I was being asked to take over repositories full of configuration files. No, thanks.
ep103 3y ago
Yup, this is what I'm working on right now. 10 microservices to support a 2 page static html webpage. We "needed" microservices for "Scalability", but we will never have more than a few hundred users at a time. We can't have simple logging of our services, because all logs have to go to Loki, and Loki only does full text search. So first, learn how to query with Grafana's querying language in order to do any searches at all, then figure out what you will ever need to search, and turn that into a prometheus metric, but wait, now we have to properly compose our metrics for queryability.... I need to implement retry logic in one of my microservices. Would be easily implementable with an Amazon SQS or RabbitMQ queue. But we can't have queues, because they aren't stateless. We need to use Kafka because it has the ability to scale to billions of events, never mind that we never see more than 10k events in a 24 hour period. So now we'll need to write custom logic for retries and managing state outside of the queue, which means we're back to using database tables, which means there's no point to using kafka to begin with for our application... Our services build in gitlab to docker images which then are hosted in the cloud and managed by k8s in custom vpcs. Sure, makes sense. But also, can someone show me how the developers on the team are supposed to be able to run the system locally? What? Can't do it? Replicating the production environment for local builds is now too heavy a lift and has been deprioritized by management? So how are they supposed to develop again? Oh, they'll just never learn how the whole system works, and continuously make changes they assume are isolated to their specific microservice without realizing they've introduced an error into the wider system unless the lead/manager catch it? Got it. I could go on. Architects choosing technologies over listening to their engineers, in order to pad their resumes with technologies that look good to other architects. Committees of middle-managers choosing the 'safe' enterprise technologies instead of what is actually needed.
- belmont_sup 3y ago
  I can feel the raw anger and exasperation. Well done.
- reidjs 3y ago
  Resume based development!
- collyw 3y ago

paganel 3y ago

> How many users do these apps have? There aren't that many projects that have "millions" of users.

citrin_ru 3y ago

Startup mentality - you preparing to serve 100M users even if you have 1.5 right now and it will be rare luck to have even 1M because if you will not hit high numbers it doomed: high investment will not bring equally high returns and everything will be scrapped.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
100M records is ~ 20 GB database. One of my companies needs to deal with large spikes in traffic coming from sudden virality on Tiktok and it peaks at around 8M users within a day or so. I handle all of that on a single beefy Hetzner machine with cycles to spare.
- collyw 3y ago
  Stack overflow has very modest requirements considering it's one of the most visited sites on the net. https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance