don't you think it's highly unlikely that someone will stumble over the power cable in a hosted datacenter like hetzner? and even if, you could just run a provisioned secondary server that jumps in if the first becomes unavailable and still be much cheaper.

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motorest 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> don't you think it's highly unlikely that someone will stumble over the power cable in a hosted datacenter like hetzner?

You're not getting the point. The point is that if you use a single node to host your whole web app, you are creating a system where many failure modes, which otherwise could not even be an issue, can easily trigger high-severity outages.

> and even if, you could just run a provisioned secondary server (...)

Congratulations, you are no longer using "one big server", thus defeating the whole purpose behind this approach and learning the lesson that everyone doing cloud engineering work is already well aware.

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juped 5 days ago | parent [-]

Do you actually think dead simple failover is comparable to elastic kubernetes whatever?

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motorest 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Do you actually think dead simple failover is comparable to elastic kubernetes whatever?

References to "elastic Kubernetes whatever" is a red herring. You can have a dead simple load balancer spreading traffic across multiple bare metal nodes.

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juped 5 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks for switching sides to oppose yourself, I guess?

	▲	motorest 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Thanks for switching sides to oppose yourself, I guess? I'm baffled by your comment. Are you sure you read what I wrote?

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toast0 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know about Hetzner, but the failure case isn't usually tripping over power plugs. It's putting a longer server in the rack above/below yours and pushing the power plug out of the back of your server.

Either way, stuff happens, figuring out what your actual requirements around uptime, time to response, and time to resolution is important before you build a nine nines solution when eight eights is sufficient. :p

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kapone 5 days ago | parent [-]

> It's putting a longer server in the rack above/below yours and pushing the power plug out of the back of your server

Are you serious? Have you ever built/operated/wired rack scale equipment? You think the power cables for your "short" server (vs the longer one being put in) are just hanging out in the back of the rack?

Rack wiring has been done and done correctly for ages. Power cables on one side (if possible), data and other cables on the other side. These are all routed vertically and horizontally, so they land only on YOUR server.

You could put a Mercedes Maybach above/below your server and nothing would happen.

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toast0 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yes I'm serious. My managed host took several of our machines offline when racking machines under/over ours. And they said it was because the new machines were longer and knocked out the power cables on ours.

We were their largest customer and they seemed honest even when they made mistakes that seemed silly, so we rolled our eyes and moved on with life.

Managed hosting means accepting that you can't inspect the racks and chide people for not cabling to your satisfaction. And mistakes by the managed host will impact your availability.

	▲	kapone 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I hope that "managed host" got fired in a heartbeat and you moved elsewhere. Because they don't know WTF they're doing. As simple as that.

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icedchai 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's unlikely, but it happens. In the mid 2000's I had some servers at a colo. They were doing electrical work and took out power to a bunch of racks, including ours. Those environments are not static.