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Distributed hosting is incredibly efficient. Me browsing a website for my local pizza joint should be a connection from my pc, through a couple of switches/rou

by AyyEye 2y ago

Distributed hosting is incredibly efficient. Me browsing a website for my local pizza joint should be a connection from my pc, through a couple of switches/routers, to the PC in their office. As it stands now I have to route out of town to the nearest datacenter hosting their web platform. Then I need to make more requests out of town to every third party analytic, font, and framework their platform includes. Not to mention the associated energy cost of running all of that code. Every one of those requests triggers a cascade of dozens of database updates, replications, and algorithm updates across many geographically diverse datacenters. (Yes I am aware that 'distributed' means many different things depending on the context and is largely a meaningless word)

smelendez 2y ago
Restaurants are a good example of where this breaks down, though, I think. There are cash-only bars with mechanical registers, and food trucks with no electric hookups, and small third-party kitchens in bars and corner stores that all have websites or at least social media profiles with hours, menu, location, etc. These businesses have no interest in running a web server. They may not even have internet access onsite beyond employee cellphones.
- hackable_sand 2y ago
  Wrong angle.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  Exactly right. No one is bemoaning the lack of restauranteurs constructing their own buildings or farming their own food. Why do we want them to host their own website?
- INTPenis 2y ago
  You're absolutely right, and yet the romantic in me still thinks there is hope. I have an excellent example where some friends used to run a wifi mesh in my city. They handed out mesh nodes to small business owners like restaurants and corner shops. These devices were tiny, and only required power since they were mesh nodes. The point here is that these nodes lasted for years. Sometimes we went around and restarted, or updated firmware, but by and large they worked so well that they were forgotten by the business owner. This was 10 years ago, today a local web server, or similar device, might work in a similar way. One idea would be to integrate it into their internet package. They get a router that gives their shop wifi, at the same time it also runs their ordering system. I think it's possible, anything is possible if you're motivated, but large businesses don't like independence. They prefer that small business and end users are dependent on them.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    The masses of small businesses yearn to put their local cable monopoly on the critical path of their revenue? This is your belief?
    - INTPenis 2y ago
      Yeah you're right, it would be better as a separate box next to their router. The router was just a tempting entrypoint since every pizzeria and falafel joint has one.
protocolture 2y ago
Except not every pizza joint can afford their own network engineer, IT Security officer, hardware guy. Small firms that try to roll their own often fail because these things become neglected. They already franchise in so that the franchiser can perform these central tasks in a more efficient manner. The franchise looking at the costs of on prem vs hosted vs colo vs cloud will probably find that on prem is the least efficient way they can go about it.
jeffbee 2y ago
> Me browsing a website for my local pizza joint should be a connection from my pc, through a couple of switches/routers, to the PC in their office. I don't think you have a very good picture of the energy costs involved. Half of the energy costs in the total worldwide collection of information systems are in wireless links at the edges of the network (mobile networks and wifi). So if you traverse two wireless links on the way to your pizza joint it is likely that you have caused the worst-case energy usage. An optical link to your nearest cloud datacenter is going to need less energy. Not to mention the now-always-on nature of the pizza place's PC, which can't be as efficient as a multi-tenant cloud system, has terrible AC/DC conversion losses, spectacularly bad HVAC inefficiency, etc.

by AyyEye 2y ago

smelendez 2y ago

Restaurants are a good example of where this breaks down, though, I think. There are cash-only bars with mechanical registers, and food trucks with no electric hookups, and small third-party kitchens in bars and corner stores that all have websites or at least social media profiles with hours, menu, location, etc. These businesses have no interest in running a web server. They may not even have internet access onsite beyond employee cellphones.

hackable_sand 2y ago
Wrong angle.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
Exactly right. No one is bemoaning the lack of restauranteurs constructing their own buildings or farming their own food. Why do we want them to host their own website?
INTPenis 2y ago
You're absolutely right, and yet the romantic in me still thinks there is hope. I have an excellent example where some friends used to run a wifi mesh in my city. They handed out mesh nodes to small business owners like restaurants and corner shops. These devices were tiny, and only required power since they were mesh nodes. The point here is that these nodes lasted for years. Sometimes we went around and restarted, or updated firmware, but by and large they worked so well that they were forgotten by the business owner. This was 10 years ago, today a local web server, or similar device, might work in a similar way. One idea would be to integrate it into their internet package. They get a router that gives their shop wifi, at the same time it also runs their ordering system. I think it's possible, anything is possible if you're motivated, but large businesses don't like independence. They prefer that small business and end users are dependent on them.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  The masses of small businesses yearn to put their local cable monopoly on the critical path of their revenue? This is your belief?
  - INTPenis 2y ago
    Yeah you're right, it would be better as a separate box next to their router. The router was just a tempting entrypoint since every pizzeria and falafel joint has one.

protocolture 2y ago

Except not every pizza joint can afford their own network engineer, IT Security officer, hardware guy. Small firms that try to roll their own often fail because these things become neglected. They already franchise in so that the franchiser can perform these central tasks in a more efficient manner. The franchise looking at the costs of on prem vs hosted vs colo vs cloud will probably find that on prem is the least efficient way they can go about it.

jeffbee 2y ago

> Me browsing a website for my local pizza joint should be a connection from my pc, through a couple of switches/routers, to the PC in their office. I don't think you have a very good picture of the energy costs involved. Half of the energy costs in the total worldwide collection of information systems are in wireless links at the edges of the network (mobile networks and wifi). So if you traverse two wireless links on the way to your pizza joint it is likely that you have caused the worst-case energy usage. An optical link to your nearest cloud datacenter is going to need less energy. Not to mention the now-always-on nature of the pizza place's PC, which can't be as efficient as a multi-tenant cloud system, has terrible AC/DC conversion losses, spectacularly bad HVAC inefficiency, etc.