Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> I’m guessing you can build AWS in a weekend

No, but a service on my NUC has better uptime than a service on AWS, and costs less, so why would I want to build AWS?




Because your service neither could handle a million concurrent users tomorrow nor a power outage. Those probably aren't your requirements, but they are for most companies.


Only a tiny portion of companies ever reach a million concurrent users tomorrow, nor have plans to reach them, having enough to pay the bills is already quite good.

A power outage can be dealt just like in the old days with a UPS unit.


> Because your service neither could handle a million concurrent users tomorrow nor a power outage.

SRE here.

92% of all companies can't handle this either.


> million concurrent users

sure, but 99% of sysadmins/devops/SRE/whatever will never work on anything that has million concurrent users.

Most startup will never reach million concurrent users. And if they do, investors will happily shuffle as much money as you need to make your site work at that scale.

Hell even million monthly users is a nice milestone that most projects never reach, and that usually translates to couple of thousand concurrent request (peak), that average laptop could handle.


I absolutely have a UPS in my basement. Considering how little runs on it, it's pretty cheap to get a long runtime out of it too.

A lot of things I see with millions of concurrent users aren't actually monoliths: Sure, Facebook needs to handle that. But most cloud apps would better be run where each tenant/business/team operates an Intel NUC in their basement, instead of the developer using the cloud as a way to force rent-seeking behavior.


Not having to deal with hardware is nice, and I don't think having datacenter grade internet access in your basement is realistic for most.


Do you need datacenter grade? Fiber can probably serve a lot of requests per second


Unless your fiber has an outage, then you want redundancy, multiple independent uplinks that is.

And if your whole region has a problem, which is more likley to happen than one might think, then you want a multi-region setup e.g. us-west-1 and us-east-2, and then we can start to calculate the numbers of nines, unless your username is ocdtrekkie, he can beat AWS with a single NUC while he is sleeping.


Many big things started out in a garage, with very simple solutions like your little UPS powered NUC.


Including Google. Who have now hit a point where that's no longer sustainable, and developed a set of best practices to ensure reliability beyond what you can expect from a NUC in the basement.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: