undefined | Better HN

0 pointsactually_a_dog4y ago0 comments

You left off 10 servers: 2 Redis servers, 3 tag engine servers, 3 Elasticsearch servers, and 2 HAProxy servers. So, that's 23 servers in total, which is not a trivial amount, but also not a huge number, either.

0 comments

gregoriol4y ago

What is really interesting to me is that they just have a very small number of each kind. It's not like they have 50 redis servers, it's just 2. 2 looks more like a smaller project ar first, but it's great proof that a lot can be achieved by doing engineering.

Jnr4y ago

They are probably able to do it with little because they understand what they are doing.

There are too many developers and teams that don't understand the underlying principles and limitations of the technology they use. In a good case those developers get schooled by experienced engineers, but frequently they end up in an important position in some big enterprise software company and makes life miserable for many people.

actually_a_dogOP4y ago

I agree. This also ties back to the whole "a junior developer could clone Stack Overflow," or "I could do that in a weekend" mentality.

Sure, maybe a junior dev can make a simple forum, or you could make a web app that duplicates the functionality of SO at low loads in a weekend. But, when you're serving an average of 500 requests per second, you need to know what you're doing. And, IMO, this "knowing what you're doing" is the difference between knowing how to engineer a system and how to write an application.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse