Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tony-allan 1206 days ago
In the diagram [1], I can see why you might design it that way if starting from scratch but it works as is so why change it.

Is there a particular reason to suggest a change to the architecture?

[1] https://twitter.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952/photo...

2 comments

Diagram 1 has the comment "What I think it should be".

It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look like".

It's amazing how much performance and scalability you can get out of computers, if you don't burden them with 100x overhead caused by shoveling data between microservices all the time :-)

    It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be
    like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to
    guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look
    like".
That's not a better interpretation. It says something (something not good) about the mindset of modern software engineers that the first thing they think of when they look at a website like StackOverflow is a n-layer microservice architecture, with more moving components than a Swiss chronometer.
This comment also says something.

You've taken the opinion of one engineer and used it to denigrate the mindset of all modern (young ?) software engineers.

From Britannica:

modernity, the self-definition of a generation about its own technological innovation, governance, and socioeconomics. To participate in modernity was to conceive of one's society as engaging in organizational and knowledge advances that make one's immediate predecessors appear antiquated or, at least, surpassed

In engineering, etc, these days, it usually refers to the idea that a single solution works for all people / use cases. Kubernetes proponents are a great example of current day modernists.

You have a very odd interpretation of "modern".

Kubernetes was initially released 9 years ago.

And it's not worlds apart from VM managers like vSphere which is 14 years old.

It is absolutely a better interpretation. The former signals arrogance while the latter shows that OP accepts the inferiority of their guess in comparison to the actual architecture.
The word "should" might be confusing here. I didn't read it as the author recommending a change; rather the author first proposes "Given what I know about Stack Overflow, they must be doing something like this, right?" Then boom comes the surprising revelation.