Instant Cloud – SSD Bare Metal Servers
In this technical retrospective (2015), @edouardb shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 171 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 79 comments
A truly great way to demo a product while also making use of unallocated resources.
Unfortunately the latency to the servers from Australia is so poor and makes it practically unusable.
Here is a trace from my 100Mbit fibre:
``` samm ~ % mtr -n --report 212.47.250.196 Start: Fri Apr 10 19:36:45 2015 HOST: samm-mbp Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1.|-- 192.168.0.1 0.0% 10 1.7 2.0 1.6 4.7 0.7 2.|-- 150.101.212.44 0.0% 10 2.7 3.1 2.5 4.2 0.0 3.|-- 150.101.208.65 0.0% 10 5.3 6.9 2.7 38.1 11.0 4.|-- 150.101.33.28 0.0% 10 28.3 20.8 14.6 28.3 5.6 5.|-- 150.101.33.149 0.0% 10 170.6 170.4 170.1 170.8 0.0 6.|-- 62.115.33.97 0.0% 10 170.8 170.8 170.1 171.4 0.0 7.|-- 213.155.135.156 0.0% 10 240.9 240.7 240.2 241.2 0.0 8.|-- 80.91.251.103 0.0% 10 322.3 335.0 321.4 413.3 30.2 9.|-- 213.155.136.209 20.0% 10 319.7 329.8 317.9 355.6 14.4 10.|-- 62.115.40.86 0.0% 10 319.1 319.3 318.7 320.0 0.0 11.|-- 195.154.1.41 0.0% 10 332.5 333.0 332.3 333.9 0.0 12.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 13.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 14.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 15.|-- 212.47.250.196 0.0% 10 395.0 334.8 319.4 395.0 23.5
``` Edit: Spelling (Typo)
I made a habit out of measuring the disk performance of cloud servers, so here it is:
``` ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 11.0101 s, 97.5 MB/s
ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nbd0 /dev/nbd0: Timing cached reads: 2180 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1090.44 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in 3.02 seconds = 88.85 MB/sec ```
Back at the office, we were recently talking about the possibility of really cheap (in terms of power requirement) cloud servers which are equivalent of raspberryPi's with soldered on flash cards around the 32-64gig range. I'd bet you can pack a shitload of these in a 1U box and still have power and cooling to spare. The only expensive part might be budgeting for all those ethernet ports on the switch and uplink capacity (for bandwidth intensive servers).
One of the engineers tried running our server stack on a raspberry for a laugh.. I was gobsmacked to hear that the whole thing just worked (it's a custom networking protocol stack running in userspace) if just a bit slower than usual. I can imagine making use of loads of ultra-cheap servers distributed all around the world... IF the networking issue can be solved.
Perhaps the time is right for a more compact and cheaper wired networking solution... maybe limit the bandwidth to 1Gbps but make it ultra compact with much cheaper electronics. Sigh... a man can dream.
If ovh ever puts ssd on their kimsufi, they will blow all the micro-servers out of the water
http://www.kimsufi.com/ca/en/index.xml ↗
Meanwhile for $42 you can get dedicated SSD
http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ ↗
The only problem with all of these is no ECC
Tried it for 30mins. I installed apache2 and made a quick mirror of my personal homepage with wget.
After the 30min session the window closed and it told me that session expired. Although the actual server was still up at the ip. About 5 minutes later apache shut down, so I guess the server was destroyed.
This is great for experimenting things. You could quickly for example test "sudo rm -rf" at the root and see what it does. Nice one!