I’m not arguing that you can’t do a lot on a single server but think about how many separate skills you mentioned even after cutting corners for reliability, data loss, or security.
I’ve gone to a bunch of hackathons where some of the participants got derailed on that kind of stuff and never even got to the part of the project they cared about. My point was that it can be worth a modest amount of money not have that overhead on a small project.
Start:
* Single server on Dokku, with multiple projects
Grow:
* Switch DB to DBaaS on your hosting provider's cloud
Grow More:
* Multiple Dokku instances behind load balancer/proxy as a service
...
You can then scale vertically a LOT before you need K8s style infrastructure.
Re:Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes
by user5994461 on Saturday March 23, 2019 @08:57AM
(#19470256)
>>> StackOverflow and Google are ones that got to millions of users with a handful of servers, mostly for redundancy.
Servers that can cost $50k each. Not a good example for affordability.
You can get surprisingly far on a single box. PlentyOfFish, Mailinator, and Hacker News are all services that got to millions of users with one server. StackOverflow and Google are ones that got to millions of users with a handful of servers, mostly for redundancy.
When you have big teams that are all concurrently making changes and writing code to a live site that's mission critical, then things get complicated. But when there's only one dev and your few hundred thousand users don't mind too much if it goes down? You can just spend some one-time effort installing a stock Postgres install, scp over a single binary or tarball, and run it in the background with nohup or screen. When it's time to re-deploy, upload another version, kill it, and restart it.