Re:How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?
by lelanthran on Monday February 06, 2023 @12:57PM
(#34681347)
> The thing is, if you want to get some basic more-than-one-person scalability and proper devops then you have to overprovision by a significant factor
If you want 100.0000% uptime, sure. But you don't usually. The companies that want that kind of uptime normally has teams dedicated to it anyway.
And scaling works well on bare-metal too if you scale vertically - have you any idea the amount of power and throughput you can get from a single server?
It's concerning to keep hearing about "scaling" when the speaker means "horizontal scaling".
If you requirements are "scaling", then vertical scaling will take you far.
If your requirements are "horizontal scaling on demand", then, sure, cloud providers will help there. But, TBH, few places need that sort of scaling.
Just getting a highly available storage with any kind of performance requires you to overprovision by something like 12x (3 boxes with raid 1+0) which is frankly insane. And then you have to manage it and fix it when it inevitably breaks. The team who’s supposed to do that will be swamped by trying to keep the other 15 infrastructure services running and upgraded to a version which is only barely out of vendor support.
Re:How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?
by lelanthran on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:24AM
(#34704463)
> Just getting a highly available storage with any kind of performance requires you to overprovision by something like 12x (3 boxes with raid 1+0) which is frankly insane.
I'm not saying 100% uptime on bare metal is cheap, I'm saying 100% uptime is frequently not needed.
Have you ever had to manage one of those environments?
The thing is, if you want to get some basic more-than-one-person scalability and proper devops then you have to overprovision by a significant factor (possibly voiding your savings).
You're inevitably going to end up with a bespoke solution, which means new joiners will have a harder time getting mastery of the system and significant people leaving the company will bring their intimate knowledge of your infrastructure with them. You're back to pets instead of cattles. Some servers are special, after a while automation means "a lot of glue shell scripts here and there" and an OS upgrade means either half infra is KO for a while or you don't do OS upgrades at all.
And in the fortunate case you need to scale up... You might find unpleasant surprises.
And don't ever get me started on the networking side. Unless you're renting your whole rack and placing your own networking hardware, you get what you get. Which could be very poor in either functionalities or performances... Assuming you're not doing anything fancy.