If you're doing 10 million transactions per week (which is likely way more than what they're pulling) that's about 16 transactions processed per second. You can add inventory management, payroll management, you can run the company's email server, write all that in JavaScript, and you'll still have room to run a Minecraft server on the same laptop.

My point was not that running all that on one computer is a great idea, just that 40,000 servers for a CRUD application is way past what should be considered reasonable.

But even that's fine. I like computers, you can have 40,000 of them if you want, even if the only reason they exist is some guy's job security. However, you're insane if the guy keeping them running doesn't work for you.

▲ Anonbrit 2 days ago | parent [-]

You're suggesting that all Tesco branches should do all the PoS transactions online to a single server?

Tell me you've never designed a system at this scale without telling me you've never designed something at this scale...

▲ IsTom 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Running it on a single laptop might be an exaggeration, but I can't imagine there's any essential complexity that requires more than a few dozen servers.

▲ alexvitkov 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

No, I did not suggest that, in fact in the very comment you're replying to I said:

  My point was not that running all that on one computer is a great idea...

Regardless, if you want to strawman my passing remark, I'm happy to defend it.

Let's even say my numbers are wildly wrong, and they're processing 100x more transactions than what I claimed (which was already an overestimate). Tell me why you can't process 1600 transactions per second on one computer, especially for a country the size of the UK, where you would expect a ~15ms ping when talking to a server on the other side of the country.

	▲	amluto 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would expect outages when talking to a server on the other side of the country, and an outage preventing supermarket customers from checking out or supermarket staff from usefully restocking shelves would be a very expensive mistake. A good system here will be distributed. That being said, two servers (for redundancy) physically located at each branch ought to do the trick. Tesco has a bit over 5000 branches [0], so that’s 10k of the 40k VMWare seats right there. Throw in some extra seats so storage and compute can be separated at each location (maybe unnecessary but comes with some benefits) and so that there is still redundancy while a server or two at a site is being re-imaged and 40k seems about in the right ballpark even for a fairly lean implementation. And, sure, all those on-site servers might be relatively inexpensive industrial units designed to tolerate a toasty, dusty, and occasionally damp closet that looks nothing like a tidy datacenter, but it still makes sense to run something like VMWare on them. [0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
	▲	carlhjerpe 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It seems that you should work for Tesco, they would probably pay you well for reducing 40k VMs to 3.