alt Hacker NewsLichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games.
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
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It also seems to have significantly better availability than chess.com, where I regularly had games end abruptly and be completely removed from my game history due to what I can only assume is a server restart.
> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.