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by d00bianista 1672 days ago
Back in the day... I used to maintain and manually scale a platform that ran a regionally large social site. It was written in PHP, by two geeks in a dorm, served by Apache and had a single MySQL database and host, in a respectable datacenter. At it's greatest moment, it had a pair of keepalived-hosts in front of around 7 Apache hosts and still that single database host.

That was expensive, but not in maintenance. The amount of moving parts in that, compared to all the doohickeys of modern times, seems like 1:100.

As someone who understands very little of modern web-doohickeys, I'm very afraid of the direction we are going in and it seems like my job-security is quite high, because schools don't produce infrastructure people any more... Just happy-go-lucky developers who know how to run things on top of a credit card, on someone else's computer.

1 comments

> Just happy-go-lucky developers who know how to run things on top of a credit card, on someone else's computer.

Love that punchline, it summed it all.