News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware. Parent comment

Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by josh2600 on Monday March 16, 2015 @01:24PM (#9212838)
You can use abstraction layers to isolate yourself from issues with the underlying metal. For example, I had a good thread the last time the maintenance reboots happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9120289.

Solving multi-tenancy issues is hard, but not impossible. I think it's a lot easier with live migration. If a box is giving you problems, just move the load to a new box while maintaining the same IP addressing.

With respect to cost, yes, AWS gets expensive at scale, but if you're at scale your servers are generally not your major cost center (it's usually payroll and licensing).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by deitcher on Monday March 16, 2015 @03:07PM (#9213558)
That is what I like about the cloud. Running in your own hardware lets you be, well, "lazy" about application architecture. Running in a place where it is shared and instances can disappear forces you to design a lot more robustly and nimbly.

Of course, that design discipline is great wherever you are running....

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by toomuchtodo on Monday March 16, 2015 @03:14PM (#9213620)
Hardware is almost always cheaper than engineering time. Don't optimize prematurely.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by deitcher on Monday March 16, 2015 @03:42PM (#9213844)
Yes, but engineering is cheaper than running after real-time problems.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by toomuchtodo on Monday March 16, 2015 @03:50PM (#9213898)
Now we get to the technical debt debate. Sometimes, you have to make good decisions now instead of perfect decisions later. The market doesn't care how elegant your code is.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by deitcher on Monday March 16, 2015 @04:15PM (#9214061)
No debate, I agree with everything you have said. But sometimes you have to clean that garbage up because it does matter to the market.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by josh2600 on Monday March 16, 2015 @03:57PM (#9213950)
The market cares about uptime, and cost relative to return.

Perfect should never be the enemy of the good.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware by toomuchtodo on Monday March 16, 2015 @03:59PM (#9213961)
> Perfect should never be the enemy of the good.

Only in a world where resources are infinite does this work.

[ Parent | on HN ]