That's a fair question and something we obsess about at ClickHouse! It's mentioned in the post but we maintain continuously updated benchmarks for ClickHouse Cloud and it's on-prem shared nothing counterpart (as well as other databases!). You'll find in [1] the comparison for every ClickHouse deployment option.
From the blog post: "the fastest baseline here is ClickHouse server running on an AWS m5d.24xlarge instance that uses 48 threads for query execution. As you can see, an equivalent cloud service with 48 threads performs very well in comparison for a variety of simple and complex queries represented in the benchmark"
so there can be a small difference depending on the sizing but it's something to consider on a case per case basis and often other dimensions need to be taken into account (operational cost, bottomless storage, linear scalability, reliability etc.).
That's impressive. ClickHouse is great but it's a huge PITA to operate on-prem so you guys will be rolling in them moneys. Speaking of, maybe you know someone who had to stay in Russia and didn't go to youse guys or Altinity? We (AliExpress Russia) are looking for a CH DBA to help us implement an on-prem CHaaS. Salary is like $9-10K/month.
Basically, we're looking for the person who has at least some expertise with operating CH in production and paying big money. In four month offering $6K-$7K/month we've got ziltch.
Some time ago I learned that Postman Labs that produces a nice but not-a-rocket-science HTTP client raised $433M at multi-billion valuation and has 500 employees. Isn't it astonishing?
Postman's strength is not in the HTTP client part. It is in the SaaS part, ad I think their valuation (even though overblown) mostly reflects their corporate penetration and the willingness of many companies to pay a small amount for their services.
Centralizing and sharing your API descriptions, test suites and plans, the various ad-hoc queries people usually keep in their notes or on Slack (and lose), handling involved auth stuff which is a hassle with curl, etc.
I think they gravitate towards the same area as swagger.io or stoplight.io, but from the direction of using the existing APIs.
API schemas and test suites are usually stored as code in some sort of SCM. I googled "postman maven" and "postman gradle" and found nothing official so I guess they have nothing except stand-alone workspaces.
API registry is a useful tool with modern love for nanoservices when a team of five somehow manages ten of those but I don't see anything similar done by Postman. Two of the service registries I know of were implemented in-house for obvious reasons.
so you go from perpetually unemployed to engineer at Atlassian for a couple of years, then back to perpetually unemployed? ("never would have had jobs" according to the parent) is that typical, for most companies?
Everyone moved up a pin, and the lowest ranked company got a bootcamp grad. Now everyone moved down a pin, and the bootcamp grad wont get a job. That is roughly how this works, not as clean but the end result isn't far off.
Postman "Labs", a company that produces a glorified cURL UI and some incoherent most likely useless tools around it received $433M investment at valuation of $2B and apparently has hundreds of employees. Current state of tech is not sustainable.
As always you have to remember that the public UI of a SaaS business is rarely telling the whole story about why the headcount is what it is, and without significantly deeper knowledge of everything the business is doing, including future products in development, it's really hard to say if there are too many people or not.
Most engineers are not in a business to support the day to day running of an app. They're there to build new things to provide growth and support change. This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately. That strategy even works in the long term if you're happy to scale back future ambitions and focus on a single app. It wouldn't work for most companies that are constantly fighting for market share though.
That's why I mentioned "incoherent and probably useless other tools". Apparently, they launched some sort of no-code tool for stringing APIs together but still not ready with their GraphQL client.
For reference, another company that sells developer tools, JetBrains, has around 2000 employees.
I can't tell where you're driving with the JetBrains comparison. Truthfully, I'm a little surprised they only have 2000 employees.
They have a suite of IDEs supporting a multitude of languages, that are almost universally considered best in class. IDEs are not an easy thing to build. They developed and maintain the Kotlin language which has all but become the standard for Android dev. And they have integrated team collaboration tools that range from project management to CI to cloud dev environments.
I am not surprised. Hire carefully with specific requirements in mind, stay hyper-focused on your product(s), and eschew corporate trends towards bloat, fomo, and "feel good" initiatives.
Margins are still very high for a tech company, so the business can be sustainable even with high R&D costs. What’s happening is the end of a cycle where everyone pulled back on their spending and companies try to keep the same margins by managing their expenses as they cannot attract more revenue.
But JetBrains has a whole suite of tools, supporting many plugins, creating their own jvm lang, with support team who actually respond and verify tickets.
> This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately.
It is to be determined if "doing an Elon" will work out for Twitter in even the short term. Give Twitter 1-2 years of "doing an Elon" before we judge the success of this approach.
Oh, man, I guess you are just repeating the point that every company is bloated.
The public UI (and performance) of a SaaS business is the one thing that adds value to society and is valued by its customers. Yes, new products development is a really great place to put some people, but how often do you see those large companies develop something good by themselves?
wow. i usually push back against the mindless "that's too many engineers what are they all doing XDDD" meme. but this is actually insane, i can't believe there's more than a single person working on postman.
They do have other tools with the word API in them but I kinda doubt their usefulness because of gems like "it will move you left on Gartner quadrant" all over Postman "Labs" website. Another reference point - WhatsApp had around 50 engineers when it was sold to Facebook.
I actually find postman quite useful for the work I do (heavily api-related) - if you work in that space, what other tools would you recommend instead?
The Postman UX is not good on it. It's easy to get lost in tabs, they should ditch the tabs and categorize requests under the actual endpoint. There is also no way to easily save like requests and give them better names that is also searchable. It's also built on electron which means its slow and clunky.
There is nothing good in this space. Swagger would do it if they let you save requests to local browser storage and just added a history dropdown to the endpoints. I use swagger and save common requests to a file system and open them in sublime. if its just JSON payloads I am working with it does the job.
The problem I've had with Postman is the sharing between team members. Everyone needs to add new requests, edit (locally) but sometimes sav the edits back to the collection.
Someone has to modify the auth script and have it update for everyone.
I thought this is what the tool is designed for, but it's been a nightmare. Team members have to wipe their environment and start again regularly. I want to think that we've completely mucked up using it but I'm not sure it's us and not the tool.
I use Postman all the time for work and it is definitely useful.
But it seems to be getting worse not better as they tack on more features and make it more complicated.
It seems like it's been years since they added anything I need and instead it has just gotten harder to use due to extra fluff. And it's buggier than it's ever been.
From the FAQ on the trial page, it seems like it will simply not run if there is nowhere to dump the excess heat:
How much of my hot water will it deliver?
A useful base load. If the heata unit ran all day it would deliver about 4.8kWh of hot water which is about the amount of hot water an average household uses. In practice the utilisation level will be lower and sometimes the water will be at temperature so the heata unit won't be able to run. We think it could deliver up to 80% of an average household's hot water, with good compute utilisation. This trial will help us learn more about how this will work in practice and enable us to give you a useful amount of free hot water at the same time.
I don't really know but guess more powerful electric motors don't cost that much more than less powerful. With ICE cars going from reasonable 200hp to say 600hp requires lots of stuff - large displacement at high RPM or turbos, better cooling and gearbox. It seems that with electric cars this kind of power is essentially free.
