alt Hacker NewsSurely the cost of running sql server on premium hardware with replication would be more than running on commodity hardware with sharding?
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groundzeros2015 • today at 11:06 AM
Only if your engineering resources and free and unbounded.
Even then I would probably use those resources to optimize software instead.
In the physical world of trucks and cranes no company would make that mistake to try to save 30-80k.
It depends on who you are paying for it, but generally a distributed system is harder to reason about, harder to fix, has weirder edge cases, and much more easily get into situations where it requires even MORE expertise to fix than just having a big honking server.
When you start calculating things that are not just the server, the single server looks cheaper and cheaper. How do you get a consistent backup? How do you do DR? How do you tune queries when it could go to this node or that node? Now writes are going to be significantly slower if you need multi-node commit because no matter what you are racing the speed of light on the network.