christian0cfg

In December of 2020, we got very nervous. Let's go a little back in time. We ran our very first infrastructure on a small German data center.

They offered a really nice UI, were GDPR compliant, and also much cheaper than the big international competitors in comparison.

What we were not aware of, was that they provided a maximum of only 10 servers.

This meant that there was no way they could scale with us long term, as our team is located in different countries and utilize hundreds of nodes. It would have not even sufficed for our launch alone.

Our dream requirements were: initially 80+ servers in one German datacenter each server having >50GB RAM and >10 vCPUs >20% automatable growth per month low price per node easy monitoring managed load balancer (HAProxy) simple reimaging dedicated NVMe SSD’s for our ETDC cluster GDPR compliant

In the long run, we want to scale to hundreds of servers per data center. We strive to have multiple data centers in the USA, Asia, Europe, Russia, and Latin America with ideally, as few providers as possible.

After having 20+ calls with hosting providers, it seemed that all of them would either be more expensive or did not provide what we required at scale.

We realized that it was unrealistic to secure and maintain our own hardware and keep our launch schedule on track at the same time.

Although we found multiple providers such as Contabo, SysEleven, and PlusServer, that could get the job done, we ultimately decided to collaborate with Plusserver to build our own datacenter on their new GAIA-X infrastructure.

We believe that trusting your infrastructure to be able to scale smoothly with you is the key requirement to be able to focus on your product.

We are more than thrilled to be working with the guys from PlusServer and whether or not this was a success, you can be the judge of, after testing Codesphere. :)

What are your experiences with infrastructure decisions? What can we do better?

At Codesphere, we code mostly in Typescript, not necessarily because it is our favorite language, but because we found out that it made us the most productive.

However, recently I came across two very strange behaviors, (I know, they are common in the JavaScript Bubble) and I felt the urge to share them!

1: ['1', '2', '10'].map(parseInt); I came across this when I wanted to format some user input, convert it into numbers and put them in a chart.

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['1', '2', '10'].map(parseInt);

This does not work, because map passes three arguments into parseInt() on each iteration. The second argument index is passed into parseInt as a radix parameter. So each string in the array is parsed using a different radix. '2' is parsed as radix 1, which results in NaN, '10' is parsed as radix 2, which is 3, and '1' is parsed as the default radix 10 because its index 0 is falsy.

2: Inheritance of 'readonly' in Typescript During a code review we came across the idea to make methods readonly. What happened next left us a little confused.

It's actually not possible to make a method readonly, but it is possible to make a readonly property with a function type, which has the same effect.

Interestingly enough, it is not possible to assign the property again for instances of the same class, but it is possible to inherit a class and override the property, as well as, assign the property on an instance of a subclass.

class Roman { readonly jonas: () => void = () => console.log("huh?"); }

class Elias extends Roman { jonas: () => void = () => console.log("oh no, override works!"); }

const elias = new Elias(); elias.jonas(); // oh no, override works! elias.jonas = () => console.log("oh no, assignment works too!"); elias.jonas(); // oh no, assignment works too!

What is your experience with Typescript? What do you find most confusing in Typescript?