Comment by crazygringo
1 day ago
> Almost every choice that leads to scalability also leads to reliability.
Empirically, that does not seem to be the case. Large scalable systems also go offline for hours at a time. There are so many more potential points of failure due to the complexity.
And even with a single regular server, it's very easy to keep a live replica backup of the database and point to that if the main one goes down. Which is a common practice. That's not scaling, just redundancy.
>Empirically, that does not seem to be the case.
Failures are astonishingly, vanishingly rare. Like it's amazing at this point how reliable almost every system is. There are a tiny number of failures at enormous scale operations (almost always due to network misconfigurations, FWIW), but in the grand scheme of things we've architected an outrageously reliable set of platforms.
>That's not scaling, just redundancy.
In practice it almost always is scaling. No one wants to pay for a whole n server just to apply shipped logs to. I mean, the whole premise of this article is that you should get the most out of your spend, so in that case much better is two hot servers. And once you have two hot...why not four, distributed across data centers. And so on.
> Failures are astonishingly, vanishingly rare
You and I must be using different sites and different clouds.
There's a reason isitdownrightnow.com exists. And why HN'ers are always complaining about service status pages being hosted on the same services.
By your logic, AWS and Azure should fail once in a millennium, yet they regularly bring down large chunks of the internet.
Literally last week: https://cyberpress.org/microsoft-azure-faces-global-outage-i...
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