Two $60 Linodes in different data centers are highly availablish considering each one could easily do x10 those numbers. The thing in the link sits behind a CDN.

Certain kinds of organizational efficiencies frequently lead to "I'm bored lets use the new hotness that would look good on my resume for the next job", hence lambda.

Actually you don't need anything at all, this is a job completely for the CDN which has enough features they aren't using to do the same thing for no additional cost.

You seem to have missed the aim of the game on their part is personalization. While it might be possible that they could do some client side processing, split the page up sufficiently, to then make multiple requests and assemble a "personalized" page, it's hard to say for certain that it would be. Certainly, it makes it less "personalized" and more "regionalized", which though being the case they describe, is likely a decision they didn't want to be locked into. For it to be truly personalized it likely needs to pull in some backend data.

Given that...you can't rely on the CDN being an optimization. You could still make the personalized calls through the CDN, if you wanted and had a clear caching policy, but something like "on load, assemble a page with real time updates on the stories this person expressed interest in" isn't going to benefit from a CDN.

Heh. OK for fun:

They have a very finite amount of new articles a day and a little box on the page with personalized headlines. All these articles, in fact all the articles on BBC of all time ever, comfortably fit into ram if you are so inclined.

Those little linodes have fast enough SSDs, try playing around and use one of countless stress loaders to get a feel.

I've served hundreds of thousands of requests a second from a single server using Varnish. A well tuned beefy VPS would do tens of thousands.

How to "personalize"?

For example Varnish has this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes https://varnish-cache.org/docs/6.0/reference/vcl.html

It will happily read whatever cookie you set and stitch together a remixed personalized page for all the BBC users in the world without a performance penalty much faster than your lambda cold starts.

CDNs sometimes let you hook into Varnish directly or expose something similar to essentially do exactly this.

The aim of the game of the guy who wrote that blog post is to reinvent something from the 90s, but worse, and blog about it.

It's not just new articles; it's also updates to existing. The idea then being you could put together a feed of updates of articles you expressed interest in, plus recommendations and such; this isn't what they're doing now, but it may be their long term goal and this is their path to it.

I will 100% agree that what they describe in the link can be done trivially without lambda (they describe a single use case of regionalization, which doesn't even take anything special on the part of the CDN), but the point is I can easily see a future use case they're building towards, that I don't think those standards you mention will support.

I don't get why not. How do you think this was achieved before lambda? Or even before aws?

It is a news site not Facebook. The feed would only ever be a subset of all the articles in cache. It can itself be cached, there are only so many permutations. Different people will have different feeds, but there will be people with the exact same feed as you.

Crunch those recommendations however you want wherever you want and spew them unto S3 at your leisure. Have your varnish cache sit on top of that. Set your personalized subscriptions via a cookie. Varnish on each request will decide which one out of n (probably n<10000) feeds to include in your html response, in under 2ms.

This is all stateless. Have two servers in two regions. Done.

Maybe you'll reboot them every couple of years.

Been there, done that. Can confirm it works swimmingly.

It is much more fun though: don't be clever. Just cache-bust on change.

Hmm, I don't think that's the primary motivation. But the NomadList guy runs everything on one VPS and he makes $2m/yr so more power to you guys. I wouldn't do it because I'd want to be able to scale the team and keep their velocity high and I think clearer process-impact boundaries help.

For what's it worth, I've worked in Ad Tech at 2 m qps and now in HFT so I'm not averse to efficiency, but org efficiency is (in my experience) very important if you're scaling the company to the $100+ m revenue range.

I think if you're scaling the company to the $100+ m revenue range you'll be able to find a team that can handle either VPS, Lambdas, both or whatever else is required.

It really depends on what it is that you're actually, you know, doing.

I think that's a bit facile. What you're actually able to do is principally a function of your agility and I think a business's choice of tech impacts that. But far be it from me to prescribe. I think these things make us more agile and you think your things make you more capable. May the market favour the approach it does.

AWS has this way of making things more approachable. It is a subtle trap. Before lambda running a VPS was not considered rocket science. It may or may not come with scaling issues, depending on your actual application and the architecture.

Lambda lets you get going quicker but comes with its own idiosyncrasies, don't get lulled into a false sense of security. You're going to end up with a devops guy either way and they'll be able to handle either scenario.

Which one you should pick really really depends. But, all things being equal, it is better to shoot yourself in the foot than having AWS shoot you in the foot.

You gave your own counter-example. NomadList has a simple app, Lambda is the wrong choice for him. BBC link tells me their thing is so trivial it is moot - whatever floats their boat.

If I was doing some complicated EMR in BigCorp with many departments and stakeholders, slinging millions of files around S3 I'd pick lambda.

If I am setting up ad servers I would not pick Lambda because it is latency sensitive. 'etc.

Get yourself a devops guy and a proper architect and game it all out.

Think of your devops guy not as a server administrator but an advance AI that accelerates the velocity of your team to new peaks of productivity. They are not only debugging their code in production at 3am but your org processes.