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SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

(databasearchitects.blogspot.com)
589 points greghn | 2 comments | 20 Feb 24 16:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.015s | source
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siliconc0w ◴[20 Feb 24 17:23 UTC] No.39444011[source]▶
Core count plus modern nvme actually make a great case for moving away from the cloud- before it was, "your data probably fits into memory". These are so fast that they're close enough to memory so it's "your data surely fits on disk". This reduces the complexity of a lot of workloads so you can just buy a beefy server and do pretty insane caching/calculation/serving with just a single box or two for redundancy.
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jeffbee ◴[20 Feb 24 17:39 UTC] No.39444225[source]▶
"I will simply have another box for redundancy" is already a system so complex that having it in or out of the cloud won't make a difference.
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1. Nextgrid ◴[20 Feb 24 18:10 UTC] No.39444624[source]▶
It really depends on business requirements. Real-time redundancy is hard. Taking backups at 15-min intervals and having the standby box merely pull down the last backup when starting up is much easier, and this may actually be fine for a lot of applications.

Unfortunately very few actually think about failure modes, set realistic targets, and actually test the process. Everyone thinks they need 100% uptime and consistency, few actually achieve it in practice (many think they do, but when shit hits the fan it uncovers an edge-case they haven't thought of), but it turns out that in most cases it doesn't matter and they could've saved themselves a lot of trouble and complexity.

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2. littlestymaar ◴[20 Feb 24 20:19 UTC] No.39446365[source]▶
So much this.

I'd github can afford the amount of downtime they do, it's likely that your business can afford 15 minutes of downtime every once in a while due to a failing server.

Also, the less servers you have overall, the least common a failure will be.

Backups and cold failover server are mandatory, but anything past that should be weighted on a rational cost/benefit analysis, and for most people the cost/benefit ratio just isn't enough to justify infrastructure complexity.