[HN Gopher] A single server can go a long way these days
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       A single server can go a long way these days
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2024-08-24 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | bravetraveler wrote:
       | Bold words from captain Kubernetes. Meant in good spirit, just
       | having fun
        
         | mindcrash wrote:
         | Kelsey is not against Kubernetes, just like he isnt against
         | Microservices.
         | 
         | But like me he wants you to really THINK and CONSIDER why you
         | should use Kubernetes and Microservices in the first place.
         | 
         | Kubernetes has its place.
         | 
         | Single servers have their place.
         | 
         | Monoliths have their place.
         | 
         | Microservices have their place.
         | 
         | In the end, its all about tradeoffs.
        
           | bravetraveler wrote:
           | I think about it plenty for work :( None of this is a
           | judgement, elbowing between unknowing friends
        
       | cjk wrote:
       | I wish there were more people saying stuff like this these days.
       | Reaching for k8s right out of the gate is so rarely the necessary
       | approach.
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | One of the problems is managing a server is a giant pain in the
         | ass. Say you run your Java app on the said H3 instance, keeping
         | it "clean" requires tooling like ansible or chef. Docker is
         | another option and containers are a nice abstraction. You can
         | still run a single container on this giant instance.
         | 
         | But then you have to update the container, and you need a
         | script to do it. Then you need to roll something back, maybe
         | automatically. Maybe you want a load balancer in front of your
         | server to do TLS termination, and at this point you'd benefit
         | from just using k8s (or ecs or google cloud run)
        
         | awoimbee wrote:
         | In the current ecosystem even for a single server I would use
         | K8S via something like minikube. You get for free: operators,
         | observability, a standard API (so you can use helm and such),
         | ...
        
       | thelastparadise wrote:
       | Thats a small single server he uses as an example.
       | 
       | Multi TB RAM and 128+ cores on one node is pretty easy these
       | days.
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | He points to Ruby on Rails for this sort of configuration.
       | 
       | I'd say the inverse...... Ruby on Rails is so slow that it needs
       | larger computing power. Using Golang for your back end single
       | server will wring out the performance you need from that single
       | machine.
        
       | firesteelrain wrote:
       | Question: Would provisioning a very large single server to run
       | multiple apps or things be considered a valid Cloud pattern?
        
       | denysvitali wrote:
       | I think the key message here is that knowing when to use a given
       | technology (e.g: Kubernetes) is good - but it's more important to
       | recognize when not to use it.
       | 
       | Don't get me wrong, I love Kubernetes, but I agree w/ Kelsey here
       | - if you're running Kuberenetes on top of an orchestrated
       | hypervisor and not using it to the fullest, you're just losing on
       | performance.
       | 
       | I think we generally forget how bare metal (and scaling
       | vertically) can sometimes be the right approach, like illustrated
       | in this Let's Encrypt blog post:
       | https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers
        
       | OutOfHere wrote:
       | There is a simple heuristic for what to use:
       | 
       | Use whatever keeps the cloud costs the lowest while ensuring the
       | reliability is acceptable.
       | 
       | For client projects, a trick is to pretend the cloud expenses are
       | coming out of your own wallet.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-24 23:01 UTC)