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0 pointsimiric9mo ago0 comments

Modern hardware in conjunction with smart software choices can be very capable, but it's pretty negligent to run a service people depend on with such limited resources.

Sure, not every site needs to run on a highly-available elastic cluster of nodes, but the alternative mindset of actively rejecting this architecture is arguably even more harmful.

A healthy deployment should be able to scale up and down easily, if not automatically. I wouldn't want to be woken up at 3am because prod1 needs a CPU/RAM/disk increase and a reboot, and the users wouldn't like that either.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

arccy9mo ago· 2 in thread

> service people depend on

why wouldn't you cap a free service? imo it's more irresponsible to demand other people keep a thing you don't pay for running just because you happen to depend on it.

imiricOP9mo ago

Just because a service doesn't require direct payment doesn't mean that its users shouldn't have any expectations of availability. There should be fair usage limits, of course, even if the service is commercial, but being caught by surprise by a traffic surge and boasting that it runs on underpowered hardware when the project is 10+ years old is irresponsible IMO.

Also, any service can have a financial purpose, even if it's "free" for users. This very forum is "free", yet the cost of hosting it is indirectly paid for by being an ad for the company that runs it. HN also famously runs on underpowered hardware that routinely fails to meet demand, but that is beside the point.

ku1ik9mo ago

Feel free to NOT use asciinema.org if it doesn't meet your expectations for a reliable service. You can always self-host the server in your ultra-reliable, super-scalable K8S cluster.

ku1ik9mo ago

There’s few reasons for this. First, I don’t have infinite budget for this, in fact the budget is close to 0 (sponsorships and donations help). Second, the servers are sponsored by Brightbox, and I’ve been running asciinema.org there for over a decade because BB is reliable and they’re great chaps, but I don’t have infinite resources available there. Finally, I don’t want devops complexity in my side projects.

phaer9mo ago

Sounds preferable compared to be woken up at 5 am by your cloud providers billing alert.

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