It depends. If you want a service that doesn't have downtime because of a hardware issue, then you should have at least 2 machines. And then, you probably want to do deployments in a way where you spin up 2 new machines and then, only once confirmed that the deployment works, shut down the old 2.

That is super easy to do on AWS (and many other providers) but not so easy (or even impossible) anymore when you do things on-prem.

Super easy? Getting that setup for the first time from zero knowledge will probably take a few days. And that's before understanding all the intricacies like your AWS bill, the hidden costs of cloud, properly securing IAM and setting up your VPC etc etc

Not once in my entire career have I seen people successfully avail themselves of the cloud's purported benefits. I have, however, seen a lot of happy account managers in Las Vegas during Re:Invent, oh yes.

Comparably easy, yes. I'm not talking specifically about AWS btw, but even there it is easy.

If someone has zero knowledge, then everything will take them a long time, including hosting on-prem or so.

I got downvoted for saying something similar for standing up a web app from scratch and getting it deployed securely.

You are absolutely correct

I'm sorry, but the ten billionth CRUD web app really doesn't need nine nines.

I agree. It doesn't change my argument though.

Just a blue green! But I agree somewhat. Single machine running Docker compose is pretty decent. Pets! Not cattle. (I'd rather care for a dog than a 100 sheep)

It is exactly as easy, or easier, to do this in proxmox than it is in AWS console, and would have a price breakeven point of less than a year (you only need two physical nodes).

Proxmox is just a way to virtualize things. You need hardware to run it. So what hardware are you talking about?

Missing the point that you don't need to be able to spin up/down servers. You can just rent 2 and spin up/down containers.

> You can just rent 2 and spin up/down containers.

Missing what point? You are apparently agreeing with me and disagreeing with the OP who said: "can run on a raspberry pi or mini PC".

No, you most definitely can just spin up/down containers on a raspberry pi or mini PC as well.

This is what I objected to:

> And then, you probably want to do deployments in a way where you spin up 2 new machines and then, only once confirmed that the deployment works, shut down the old 2.

You don't need to spin up more machines or shut down machines. As long as you ensure you have the headroom you spin up containers and shut down containers. By doing that, it's also relatively easy to set up hybrid setups where you can handle load-spikes by scaling into EC2 or similar if you should ever need to.

> As long as you ensure you have the headroom you spin up containers and shut down containers.

Are you very sure you are not introducing potential additional problems with that approach? Because if you do, then I wouldn't say it's "not needed" to spin more additional machines - it would depend on those additional problems.

Yes, I am, very much sure of that, based on 20 years of experience deploying containers that way, and nearly the same length of experience using cloud instances. They are equivalent in complexity. It is purely down to how you want to host things and whether cost matters to you - the managed approach is consistently significantly cheaper for all but the very, very smallest environments where factors like discounts and free tiers play in.

Literally any random x86 box you have lying around. NUCs work fine here, but so do used Optiplexes from Craigslist or your old gaming PC.

Does proxmox have 24/7 enterprise support yet?

Digital Ocean I believe is pay as you go and supports this for anyone who can click "link my Github account" and auth themselves.

Digital Ocean is not equal to "run on a raspberry pi or mini PC and be just fine".

Most web projects can tolerate an hour of scheduled downtime a week and the occasional (< 1/year) unscheduled hour of downtime to replace broken hardware. Running on a single machine with 2 disks in RAID1 right up until the point where the ~50 hours of downtime a year equal one engineer's salary in lost revenue makes sense if you pick a DC that will sell/rent you replacement hardware and do replacements for you. Just make sure you have offsite backups in case the DC burns down. If your office/home is near a well stocked computer store, most web projects can skip the DC altogether and just put the server in the closet under the stairs or whatever. The company will likely die before the server does anyways.

> Most web projects can tolerate an hour of scheduled downtime a week and the occasional (< 1/year) unscheduled hour of downtime to replace broken hardware.

An hour? What happens if it breaks while I'm on vacation and no one is there to take care?

Nah, that argument might work sometimes but not in general.

Yes, an hour. In practice, most scheduled maintenance will take closer to a minute than the full scheduled hour. If it's good enough for the government and the bank, it's probably good enough for you.

What happens if you're on vacation and something breaks is that you call/email the DC and ask them to replace what's broken, same as if you were not on vacation. In my experience most DCs will have the replacement done in less than 30 min from receiving the ticket, good ones will do it in under 15. If the project is ran by more than one person, simply don't all take a vacation at the same time. Worst case scenario you point DNS to a free static page host that reads "Server broke. Working on a fix, check back tomorrow." (or the appropriate corporate-PR phrasing of the same if applicable) while you wait for the computer store to open so you can buy a new one.

Even if you are once-in-a-lifetime unlucky and the damn thing breaks while you're on vacation and for some reason your monitoring fails to notify you, big whoop. You can probably get away with just apologizing for the inconvenience and moving on. If a week long outage is enough to make or break your business, your business isn't gonna work out anyway.

This applies to practically all web projects from the home page of the pizza place on the corner of your street to 100-employee e-commerce sites. If a single machine can run it, it can probably run on a single machine. Use the dumbest tool that will get the job done, switch to a smarter tool when it won't.

Even just setting up and documenting all the things you mentioned is already taking so much time and effort, that I'd rather pay a few more bucks for a HA system...

> If a week long outage is enough to make or break your business, your business isn't gonna work out anyway.

If your business has an SLA with its customers, having a week long outage is going to break your business. Some contracts I saw had a 15 minute reaction time where you had to acknowledge the issue, and after 1 hour of downtime there are penalties. The same contract also required redundancy (of hardware, internet lines as well as location for the DCs). We could not have hosted that on a Raspi, or a single machine.

I don't think reducing the scale issue to "you ain't gonna need it" is right. Obviously to most projects it's not gonna be needed. But when it does and you need to grow, you'll be happy you have a redundant infrastructure that you can spin up/down easily instead of having to call your DC to ask for more hardware to be installed.

To be fair, that is probably out of scope for what OP meant.

Maybe for the author of the blog post, about his personal projects. But the user I replied to seemed to indicate even "100-employee e-commerce sites" don't need any redundancy for their website, which I disagree with.

"If your business has an SLA with its customers" then you also need a paid SLA with Amazon and now we're talking about the 100k annually cost range where you can also afford to hire freelancers to babysit your sever while you're gone.

What happens if AWS has a hiccup that restarts your VM?

The answer might be to buy management services. Or an SLA for AWS.

Most but not all.

If you're running an online shop/reservation system, a hour of downtime can be tens of thousands of lost revenue.

Revenue, not profit. Many small shops voluntarily turn off their website for some weeks so that the employees can take a Christmas break. So it seems like the business can handle a week offline.

> That is super easy to do on AWS (and many other providers) but not so easy (or even impossible) anymore when you do things on-prem.

False. You can run kubernetes and/or some virtualisation engine as well and do the same on prem.

and overprovisioning physical hardware is much cheaper.

Well, yes. I would categorize "running kubernetes on prem" as "not so easy".

And you can easily have a separate clean environment for every pull request easily.

Can't do that with your own hardware unless it's also a Kubernetes cluster, which is a whole new set of crap you need to manage.

> not so easy (or even impossible) on-prem

It’s as if an entire generation of tech workers are utterly unaware that these have been solved problems for decades.

You put two machines behind HAProxy with keepalived. If you want to do a new deployment, you can spin up new machines in the same manner, and cut them over (or any of the many other ways to accomplish this).

AWS isn’t inventing any of the HA stuff they offer; they’re taking existing technologies and packaging them.

So how do you do all of that with "a raspberry pi or mini PC"? You would need at least 4 of them.

I was replying to your comment, not the other. But sure, get 4 RPis if you want. You could also be using containers on them, and not need to swap whole computers. Or run each app in its own chroot jail. Or run VMs. There are many, many ways to accomplish this goal.

Most web projects can afford to be down for a bit. Even the big guys have outages fairly often. It's not like AWS is always running smoothly either, and there are so many "_ is down" posts on HN alone.

I do agree that your projects should be designed to be well contained and easy to create a new instance of it, though.

If you have enough users that you need to scale to more machines ... run the rpis in a 3d printed 1u rack adaptor as a kubernetes cluster.

Seems like a pointless thing to talk about, "most web projects today". You don't know what specific requirements people have, and people have been making "web projects" with limited resources since the web started.

Yet, for some reason, I see this repeated everywhere, always. Does it make the people who repeat it feel better? Are they actually informing anyone of anything? Who knows.

I don’t see a refutation or even disagreement with the claim in your comment. Are you saying that this is too obvious to restate?

The implied refutation of "You don't know what specific requirements people have" is that there will be people with specific requirements that a Pi/Mini PC obviously doesn't meet.

Like what?

Any type of redundancies.. Geo, power, network. There's a million possible reasons why someone can't just deploy on a pi and call it a day.

Do you need that? If a storm knocks my power out for a couple hours and my side project has an outage, that's fine.

This is side project, not typical web project. For a typical web project stability and safety of data are paramount.

I think you mean "critical business" not "typical web project", which is not critical to anything.

Granted, I'm sure the average engineer will be very relieved to find out they're paramount to production.

If you're making money off a project I suspect you're generally too far gone for advice. Then again I suppose you don't need it.

One Million Checkboxes seems like a candidate:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Checkboxes

It looks like RPi should be able to handle that.

> You don't know what specific requirements people have

This is actually pretty apparent if you camp a web forum. People seem to either need a raspberry pi or a data center: this is the typical web-app vs mmorpg divide amongst possible computational fantasies people have. Questioning what motives people have is very sensible.

Not only that, people always assume that you need complicated dependencies if they use AWS and compare any of the other company's stack with their raspberry pi. They can use AWS lightsail just fine for $5 if they just need a VM.

If you just need a VM why not a plain EC2 instance? Why are you adding already lock-in to the secret sauce?

lightsail is just an EC2 instance plus storage. Its pretty much just a VPS. No extra locking. Its what I push people determined to use AWS because of the branding towards.

IMO if you're using plain EC2 alone you should not be using AWS anyway.

Go grab a similar server from Hetzner or something.

Lightsail is cheaper, but lacks additional enterprise-y features like VPC.

That's fair too, those $5 a month machines can also serve you well as long as you can limit bandwidth charges if you suddenly end up with a lot of traffic.

I might be biased since I posted the comment, but I don't think it's pointless :)

It's worth repeating, if only to raise awareness among devs that modern computers are _extremely_ fast. You can start a new one with commodity hardware and it will probably serve your needs for the lifetime of the project. If your project gets so popular/successful that you need more than a single machine, then I would hope by that point you know how to move it onto a cluster of machines, or into the cloud if the economics make sense.

I say "most web projects" because it's true - most web projects are simple CRUD apps in slightly different forms. Sure, there are some up-and-comers using AI to burn half a data center to produce fake comments and images for internet forums. Those won't run on a Pi or single mini PC. But people are making _so_ many web apps that will never see more than a few hundred or thousand users. Those don't need multi-instance load-balanced highly-available infinite-scaling systems to serve their users needs. That usually just adds cost and complexity until you're at a point where you _really_ need it.

I just went down the rabbit hole of trying to host a small app for free(ish) on cloud solutions, only to remember that I have a 2GB fiber line and a raspberry pi sitting idle - if it ever gets so popular that I outgrow this, it'll be a nice problem to have.

Yeah I did the same thing about a year ago only on GCP. I tried to stay in the free tier but "hidden" networking costs got me at $20/month.

The site was a blog with traffic of 1, load balancer, cloud run and storage bucket.

I shut it down. It was a nice exercise but not worth it to me long term.

Isn't that a security risk? Having to open a port for the pi and then always keeping an eye on it in case the next heartbleed, etc. is discovered?

You could set up a DMZ if you're concerned. But even if someone gets on my LAN, it's not the end of the world. They could send goatse to my Chromecast, I guess.

No, it's literally what firewalls and DMZs are for.

You're absolutely right. A little off-topic, but I've seen a similar problem on the on-prem side of things. Their server setups are a lot of the time completely overblown "because this is what the nice vendor recommended, they are great partners!"

Awesome, your 5 node Nutanix setup with 15 whole VMs is peaking at 5% of its total compute, 5% of its RAM, and 8% of its disk. Granted, I do work with medium sized businesses in the manufacturing sector, but so many get tricked into thinking they need 5 9s, when 3 is enough, and their setup isn't even providing 5 anyway because nothing else is downstream. Then 5 years later their warranty is up and they scrap it all and replace. It's crazy.

Kills me how many businesses contract this shit out and get tricked into spending a million on infra when they could just run 2 servers and pay a mid level engineer to manage it. "Not in the budget." Yeah, I wonder why.

Yeah but OTOH I’ve just set up a vm host + guest on a N100 minipc for home assistant (migrating from a bare metal pi 4) and while I’m happy with the result, I’ve spent more hours than I’d like or planned to get it working reliably vs click ‘make a vm please’ and have it waiting for an ssh connection after a coffee break.

(Started with proxmox but the installer’s kernel doesn’t have the Ethernet driver and they don’t provide WiFi because it’s stupid for the installed system - but they allow upgrading to a kernel which supports my adapter, so got a bit catch 22’d. Moved to Ubuntu server that would stop booting after creating a bridge interface because ‘waiting for network. no timeout’ and then a few more interesting issues.)