oh god i felt this one. Devs too busy, incompetent or just plain lazy to figure out why their code is so slow, so just have ops throw more CPU and memory at it to brute force performance. Then ops gets to try to explain to management why we are spending $500k per month to AWS to support 50 concurrent users.
The sad thing: Throwing hardware at a problem was actually cheaper for a long time. You could buy that $1500 CPU and put it in your dedicated server, or spend 40 developer hours at $100 a pop. Obviously I’m talking about after the easy software side optimizations have already been put in (no amount of hardware will save you if you use the wrong data structures).
Nowadays you pay $500 a month for 4 measly CPU cores in Azure. Or “less than 1 core” for an SQL Server.
Obviously you have a lot more scalability and reliability in the cloud. But for $500 a month each we had a 16 core, 512 GB RAM machine in the datacenter (4 of them). That kind of hardware on AWS or Azure would bankrupt most companies in a year.
I really hope those aren’t factorials.
This happens all the time. Companies are bleeding money into the air every second to aws, but they have enough money to not care much.
AWS really was brilliant in how they built a cloud and how they marketed everything as “pay only for what you use”.
We worked with a business unit to predict how many people they would migrate on to their new system week 1-2 … they controlled the migration through some complicated salesforce code they had written.
We were told “half a million first week”. We reserved capacity to be ready to handle the onslaught.
8000 appeared week 1.
That this is deemed brilliant is the sad part.
I mean, I would put brilliant in quotes in the way that it’s brilliant for their profits. Not brilliant in the way of making the world a better place.
64! is a whole lot more than 64 though. It’s a number with 90 digits.
Hmm is unexpected factorial a sub here yet?
They’re called “communities”, not “subs”.
subfeddit
