throwaway012377

and yet it's too difficult to package https://repology.org/project/clickhouse/versions

That depends on what's written on the CLA.

Indeed, but it's also about having the wrong mindset: piling up stuff gives people the idea that they are building something.

Removing complexity and saving CPU cycles does not feel as good to beginners.

Completely wrong. The configuration I described was replicated on different servers and they scale linearly, obviously. It was saturating the NICs and therefore would have been good enough for Netflix at the time.

It's strange that you assumed otherwise.

It was about large file streaming so bandwidth is the bottleneck, not number of users. What matters is that the configuration was good enough to use the NICs at 100%

simple things become incredibly complicated at scale

In a way it's the opposite. Things scale up by removing complex interactions. Software gets faster by solving the same problem with less steps.

Any beginner can write to much code and pile up too many software and hardware components.

It takes knowledge to simplify things.

"why does Netflix need X thousand engineers, I could build it in a weekend"

Believe me or not, I was in a company doing web file streaming in 2009 using Nginx, sendfile and SSL offloading on the NIC.

It was installed by one dude. A standard Linux distro, standard kernel and no custom software. Just compile the SSL offloading kernel module once.