<story><title>Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?</title><text>In other words, who runs operations at a scale where distributed systems are absolutely necessary, without using any sort of container runtime or container orchestration tool?&lt;p&gt;If so, what does their technology stack look like? Are you aware of any good blog posts?&lt;p&gt;edit : While I do appreciate all the replies, I&amp;#x27;d like to know if there are any organizations out there who operate at web scale without relying on the specific practice of shipping software with heaps of dependencies. Whether that be in a container or in a single-use VM. Thank you in advance and sorry for the confusion.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wanderr</author><text>Grooveshark didn&amp;#x27;t use any of that. We were very careful about avoiding dependencies where possible and keeping our backend code clean and performant. We supported about 45M MAU at our biggest, with only a handful of physical servers. I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any blog posts we made detailing any of this, though. And if you&amp;#x27;re not familiar with the saga, Grooveshark went under for legal, not technical reasons. The backend API was powered by nginx, PHP, MySQL, memcache, with a realtime messaging server built in Go. We used Redis and Mongodb for some niche things, had serious issues with both which is understandable because they were both immature at the time, but Mongodb&amp;#x27;s data loss problems were bad enough that I would still not use them today.&lt;p&gt;That said, I&amp;#x27;m using Docker for my current side project. Even if it never runs at scale, I just don&amp;#x27;t want to have to muck around with system administration, not to mention how nice it is to have dev and prod be identical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brimble</author><text>&amp;gt; That said, I&amp;#x27;m using Docker for my current side project. Even if it never runs at scale, I just don&amp;#x27;t want to have to muck around with system administration, not to mention how nice it is to have dev and prod be identical.&lt;p&gt;This is why I use docker, at work and for my own stuff. No longer having to give a shit whether the hosting server is LTS or latest-release is &lt;i&gt;wonderful&lt;/i&gt;. I barely even have to care which distro it is. Much faster and easier than doing something similar with scripted-configuration VMs, plus the hit to performance is much lower.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?</title><text>In other words, who runs operations at a scale where distributed systems are absolutely necessary, without using any sort of container runtime or container orchestration tool?&lt;p&gt;If so, what does their technology stack look like? Are you aware of any good blog posts?&lt;p&gt;edit : While I do appreciate all the replies, I&amp;#x27;d like to know if there are any organizations out there who operate at web scale without relying on the specific practice of shipping software with heaps of dependencies. Whether that be in a container or in a single-use VM. Thank you in advance and sorry for the confusion.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wanderr</author><text>Grooveshark didn&amp;#x27;t use any of that. We were very careful about avoiding dependencies where possible and keeping our backend code clean and performant. We supported about 45M MAU at our biggest, with only a handful of physical servers. I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any blog posts we made detailing any of this, though. And if you&amp;#x27;re not familiar with the saga, Grooveshark went under for legal, not technical reasons. The backend API was powered by nginx, PHP, MySQL, memcache, with a realtime messaging server built in Go. We used Redis and Mongodb for some niche things, had serious issues with both which is understandable because they were both immature at the time, but Mongodb&amp;#x27;s data loss problems were bad enough that I would still not use them today.&lt;p&gt;That said, I&amp;#x27;m using Docker for my current side project. Even if it never runs at scale, I just don&amp;#x27;t want to have to muck around with system administration, not to mention how nice it is to have dev and prod be identical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aachen</author><text>Man I miss Grooveshark still today. Spotify is okay but still a step down. Needing billion-dollar licensing schemes to even get started makes this such a hard market to actually get into and provide a competitively superior experience.</text></comment>