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I don't think the point here changes all that much if you change this to two servers and a load balancer. That's still a pretty simple setup. But I also think
by fabian2k 3y ago
I don't think the point here changes all that much if you change this to two servers and a load balancer. That's still a pretty simple setup.
But I also think that many applications are far more tolerant of small outages than you imply. And a more complex setup also adds more points that can lead to an outage even though it reduces the chance that hardware will cause one.
- kasey_junk 3y agoNearly no one is competent and able to setup a true load balancer. If you have one either it’s provided by your (most likely vm based) hosting provider or you are a big enterprise. If you are in one of those two categories then setting up something more robust than a single server isn’t much more complicated than a single server. That is to say, I think it very much does change the equation around the original statement.
- Aachen 3y agoWouldn't you also need two load balancers then? Otherwise you've still got a single point of failure. And how do you keep the failover system in sync? It's a whole can of worms to promise 100% uptime. It's super rare that a server physically breaks and suddenly goes dark with less than a day's warning, and for most applications such a once-in-5-years event is tolerable if that means the hosting costs are divided by five as well (so far I'm ~10 years in and haven't experienced such an event yet; disks in RAID have broken but not a cpu or other SPOF)
- erik_seaberg 3y ago> super rare that a server physically breaks I kinda want to know where you shop, because commodity hardware has a reputation as just utter crap. Before cloud went mainstream, I worked somewhere that had some racked servers in a colo literally catch fire. (The remote hands put them out, disconnected, and refused to touch them ever again.)