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Use One Big Server (2022)

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343 points antov825 | 4 comments | 31 Aug 25 17:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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turtlebits ◴[31 Aug 25 18:52 UTC] No.45085891[source]▶
The problem is sizing and consistency. When you're small, it's not cost effective to overprovision 2-3 big servers (for HA).

And when you need to move fast (or things break), you can't wait a day for a dedicated server to come up, or worse, have your provider run out of capacity (or have to pick a different specced server)

IME, having to go multi cloud/provider is a way worse problem to have.

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1. andersmurphy ◴[31 Aug 25 19:19 UTC] No.45086177[source]▶
Most industries are not bursty. Overprovision in not expensive for most businesses. You can handle 30000+ updates a second on a 15$ VPS.

A multi node system tends to be less reliable and more failure points than a single box system. Failures rarely happen in isolation.

You can do zero downtime deployment with a single machine if you need to.

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2. Aeolun ◴[01 Sep 25 10:59 UTC] No.45091623[source]▶
> A multi node system tends to be less reliable and more failure points than a single box system. Failures rarely happen in isolation.

Just like a lot of problems exists between keyboard and chair, a lot of problems exist between service A and service B.

The zero downtime deployment for my PHP site consisted of symlinking from one directory to another.

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3. andersmurphy ◴[01 Sep 25 13:33 UTC] No.45092591[source]▶
Nice!

Honestly, we need to stop promoting prematurely making everything a network request as a good idea.

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4. Nextgrid ◴[01 Sep 25 20:41 UTC] No.45096433{3}[source]▶
> we need to stop promoting prematurely making everything a network request as a good idea

But how are all these "distributed systems engineers" going to get their resume points and jobs?