[0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-s...
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure is the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
All their finances are also public: https://lichess.org/costs
TheSilva•1h ago