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Use One Big Server (2022)

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343 points antov825 | 5 comments | 31 Aug 25 17:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.017s | source
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decasia ◴[31 Aug 25 18:12 UTC] No.45085472[source]▶
Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then that kinda does seem like your org's fault.
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logifail ◴[31 Aug 25 18:25 UTC] No.45085592[source]▶
> and server hardware is expensive up front

You don't need to buy server hardware(!), the article specifically mentions renting from eg Hetzner.

> The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real

Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

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bearjaws ◴[31 Aug 25 18:57 UTC] No.45085947[source]▶
> Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

I run a lambda behind a load balancer, hardware dies, its redundant, it gets replaced. I have a database server fail, while it re provisions it doesn't saturate read IO on the SAN causing noisy neighbor issues.

I don't deal with any of it, I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

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1. Nextgrid ◴[31 Aug 25 21:37 UTC] No.45087339[source]▶
> I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

You don't deal with that either if you rent a dedicated server from a hosting provider. They handle the datacenter and maintenance for you for a flat monthly fee.

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2. immibis ◴[31 Aug 25 23:09 UTC] No.45087907[source]▶
They do rely on you to tell them if hardware fails, however, and they'll still unplug your server and physically fix it. And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

But the cloud premium needs reiteration: twenty five times. For the price of the cloud server, you can have twenty-five-way redundancy.

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3. 1dom ◴[01 Sep 25 08:44 UTC] No.45090814[source]▶
> And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

A medium to large size asteroid can cause mass extinction events - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

The risk of the people responsible for managing the platform messing up and losing some of your data is still a risk in the cloud. This thread has even already had the argument "if the cloud provider goes down, it's not your fault" as a cloud benefit. Either cloud is strong and stable and can't break, or cloud breaks often enough that people will just excuse you for it.

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4. namibj ◴[01 Sep 25 13:13 UTC] No.45092462{3}[source]▶
There's a reason semiconductor manufacturing is so highly automated, and it's not labor cost. Humans err. Computers only err when told. But they'll repeat a task reliably without random mistakes if told what to do by a competent (manufacturing process) engineering organization. Yes it takes more than one engineer.
5. immibis ◴[01 Sep 25 16:27 UTC] No.45094105{3}[source]▶
Many people have already had their data destroyed by remote hands replacing the wrong side of a RAID. Nobody's already had their server destroyed by a mass-extincting meteor.