nickwitha_k (he/him)

Why not turn it into a Desktop app via Electron or a similar solution?

This is a feature for me that makes me inclined to try it. I really don’t like Electron.

This right here. Just found out about this last week after a long debug.

If you don’t need UI, I prefer Podman. Rancher Desktop is good though.

I’ve found that a single database service uses less total resources (especially memory) than running separate DB stacks for each service.

This should indeed be the expected result. Each DB server will have a set amount of overhead from the runtime before data overhead comes in. Ex (made up numbers):

• storage subsystem=256MB
• config subsystem=128MB
• auth subsystem=280MB
• api subsystem=512MB
• user tables=xMB

The subsystem resource usage would be incurred by every instance of the DB server. Additionally, you have platform-level overhead, especially if you are running as VMs or containers as that requires additional resources to coordinate with the kernel, etc.

It’s very much like micro-kernels vs monoliths. On the surface a lean micro-kernel seems like it should be more performant since less is happening during kernel time but, the significant increase in operations to perform basic tasks. For example, if storage access was in userspace, an application would need to call back to the kernel to request communication, which would need to call up to the storage driver, then back… and it becomes a death of a thousand cuts. In a monolithic kernel, the application just tells the kernel that it wants to access storage, what mode, and provide either the input or a buffer receive data.

My recommendation, if practical, is a single, potentially containerized DB server that is backed by storage that provides high availability and redundancy. This is supposing that you are using the same sort of DB (ex SQL, NoSQL, etc) and that you are targeting a smallish number of services that are on-premise.

My reasoning here is that you can treat the DB server effectively as a storage API service and run it via some orchestration service like K8S. This lets you offload your DB stability and data integrity to the FS and/or other low-level stuff that is simple to configure once and only dirty about when hardware fails. This in turn greatly reduces DB server configuration and deployment as well as treat them like livestock, not pets.

Now, if you are using a public cloud provider, my view changes slightly. Generally, I’d suggest offloading the DB to a provided service that is compatible with a FOSS alternative so that you can avoid vendor lock-in. This means that you get the HA, etc without having to worry about maintenance and configuration overhead. Just be aware of cost modeling - it’s easy to run up large bills.

Observability stack?