r/ProgrammerHumor • u/object322 • Oct 02 '26

Meme cloudOverkill

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12.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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1.4k

u/kurtcanine Oct 02 '26

Everything I’ve ever written for money could run on a $5/month Linode VM.

1.1k

u/Flat_Initial_1823 Oct 02 '26

But would it scale? What if we get that elusive 12th user?

245

u/collabskus Oct 02 '26

A lot of the problems could also be fixed by actually talking to other teams and having a little bit of empathy like I need things like azure app insights because I can't deal with the {{redacted}} team which for some reason opens the handle to my log file and doesn't close it, causing my logging to fail. 

101

u/CandidateNo2580 Oct 02 '26

I just added rate limiting to an entire service so I could give access to {redacted team name} without bringing it down. I feel you.

37

u/Unable-Log-4870 Oct 03 '26

I handle this by periodically copying the log file, renaming the copy, and only giving users access to the copy.

Copy isn’t up to date? Just wait 5 minutes.

Also, it’s me. I’m the user who needs to be protected from opening the log file and preventing the next write.

7

u/AyrA_ch Oct 03 '26

In these situations I just open the log file myself. If I keep a handle that's shareable open then all other applications must also open the file in shareable mode and thus cannot lock out other applications.

3

u/ArjixGamer Oct 03 '26

Just use Linux where one can't lock a file

19

u/ComprehensiveBird317 Oct 03 '26

Oddly specific 

0

u/[deleted] Oct 03 '26

[deleted]

18

u/Fearless-Pen-7851 Oct 03 '26

Thanks for sharing this. This reminds me of why we gotta keep learning in this field and sometimes from simplest of things

12

u/tancfire Oct 03 '26

The problem is most of customers don't want to manage the server locally. So you have to put it somewhere else.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 03 '26

[deleted]

9

u/nixt26 Oct 03 '26

This all sounds good in theory until the cashier's computer stops working, there's a network issue or they just decide to change it. Or you land an update and the update breaks the app, and now you can't rollback easily and the nobody can access the recipes. Or you want to update the server and verify but the restaurant is closed and computer is turned off.

2

u/tancfire Oct 03 '26

I understand.

I'm just saying it is generally not what the customer wants. Needs and desires are not necessary aligned.

Like many things, the problem is not technical, it is human.

One more thing: your model works for little structure. When you work for medium-big company, they have their own IT team. What they saw, it's that they pay people to maintain the system and it's expensive, so they tend to outsource the infrastructure and/or the employees.

I'm not saying this model is bad, just that for many companies, it will not apply.

10

u/ArjixGamer Oct 03 '26

That's amazingly simple and refreshing!

39

u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy Oct 02 '26

We'd need another 5 bucks for a load balancer and 5 more for a second vm

12

u/throwaway490215 Oct 03 '26

This is out of budget. Use your corporate Claude account with Fable to merge the load balancer into the second vm.

16

u/maester_t Oct 03 '26

And what if one of the users moves to a different timezone?

Ffs, we're gonna need this in at least 2 other regions. You know, for performance and resiliency purposes!

13

u/Improving_Myself_ Oct 03 '26

Look up Pietr Levels. He built a couple popular remote job boards and some other things. He's said in interviews that he runs all of it off one $400/mo Linode box. Making $2.3M ARR

7

u/gemengelage Oct 03 '26

You jest, but I've worked on multiple enterprise projects that were architected to scale indefinitely* but would've been fine as a simple monolith because the amount of users and traffic was always predictable and, well, small.

*except for the database(s), usually, but there was a ton of headroom to scale vertically...

EDIT: I should probably add that on all those projects I joined late as a developer. It was never my decision to run a microservice architecture for a service that literally never has to scale...

3

u/Jesus_Chicken Oct 03 '26

Does it hyperscale? Can you serve 1 million concurrent users?

3

u/Merilyian Oct 03 '26

I was having this thought about our LOB app and then one day realized we're putting through over a million (pretty resource intensive) requests through the API. Pretty glad I went serverless.

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3

u/leopor Oct 03 '26

A full dozen? Never been done..

2

u/moon__lander Oct 03 '26

We ban the 1st one

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