Use One Big Server - Speculative Branches
Use One Big Server A lot of ink is spent on the “monoliths vs. microservices” debate, but the real issue behind this debate is about whether distributed system architecture is worth the developer time and cost overheads. By thinking about the real operational considerations of our systems, we ca...
Hasnain says:
This was great. I’m firmly in this camp - use one server, have a monolith, use SQLite - this makes things so much easier.
I was just talking the other day with a friend along similar lines and back of the envelope math suggests you can host a 1M DAU site on a $5/mo app server. Computers are fast and we tend to over engineer solutions.
“When you experience growing pains, and get close to the limits of your current servers, today’s conventional wisdom is to go for sharding and horizontal scaling, or to use a cloud architecture that gives you horizontal scaling “for free.” It is often easier and more efficient to scale vertically instead. Using one big server is comparatively cheap, keeps your overheads at a minimum, and actually has a pretty good availability story if you are careful to prevent correlated hardware failures. It’s not glamorous and it won’t help your resume, but one big server will serve you well.”
Posted on 2022-08-04T04:03:52+0000