Comment by carlsborg a day ago
The main lichess engine (lila, open source) is a single monolith program that's deployed on a single server. It serves ~5 million games per day. But there are a several other pieces too. They discuss the architecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crKNBSpO2_I
BTW consider donating if you use lichess.
Easy: If something is wrong with the physical gear it's OVH's problem rather than theirs. It also means no one has to ever go to the data center which is probably important for a geographically distributed team (I assume they are). Cheap, no-frills cloud is extremely underrated, IMO.
Heh heh heh.
To me those numbers seem on the high side as I'm (personally) used to (for cheap projects) scavenging together stuff from Ebay before deploying to a data centre. ;)
its also crazy how much cheaper it is than AWS. the primary DB is around $500/month with 32 CPU and 256 GB of RAM and 7TB. AWS RDS db.m6gd.8xlarge which is 32 CPU and 128 GB of RAM costs $2150/month before paying for storage as well.
Yup, and you also get to make AWS deal with OS upgrades, DB upgrades, backups, etc.
You have to pay 2x for multi-AZ or you get downtime for upgrades. And DB major version upgrades require manual effort unless you want to roll the dice on their new blue-green feature, which can take hours to fail or finish cutting over.
Wow. ~US$40k/mo running costs, with about US$5k/mo for server hosting:
https://lichess.org/costs
It looks like the servers are individually managed via OVH or similar, rather than running their own gear in co-location or similar. Wonder why?