My argument is that much of web development now often involves insane amount of tooling infrastructure and complexity all for the sake of delivering on cloud, scalable, virtualized, dockerized and otherwise over-processed equivalent of "hello world".

And 99% (rhetoric number of course) of needed solutions would be served by a single real server (rent one on Hetzner or wherever) with 0 need to ever upgrade.

Another interesting angle about the single real server is the reliability.. it'll eventually break from some physical cause, that happens, it hurts your uptime.

But sometimes with the big microservice/kubernetes solution, the configuration space is so big that miscommunications/mistakes could potentially take you down for more hours/year than the downsides of being single-hosted would. So now you invested all of that effort and for what?

One company I worked for wrote a distributed scheduled jobs system that was immune to single-machine failures, it went down like 4 times in a year, messing up my team each time. I was like "guys, if we just provisioned one machine with cron and no failover, it would have better reliability".

At a previous company we had Series C financing and enough people to take over two floors of an office building... and our entire SaaS offering for hundreds of white-label business customers ran fine on a couple of big load-balanced EC2 VMs and one big Postgres database with some read replicas.

Yep, HA clusters/load balancing has been around for a long time and will get you pretty far even in some pretty large environments. Hell my companies main LOB app is running off a single Microsoft SQL serve(I know, I know, we have a lot of tech debt we're working through atm and it's on the list to set up HA). The longest downtime we've had was when we had to take it down to migrate it to our new hardware cluster and that was because the data transfer took 20 hours over a 1 GB port.

That doesn't look good on a resume though and definitely won't get you hired at a FAANG company.

I design and implement products. That is what my resume says along with the list of said products and some references. This is usually enough to land me a contract. Been on my own 20 years already and make money from some products of my own or creating those for clients. The last thing I need is a job at FAANG.

Besides if it warm the cockles of your heart so much you can always take any of my products and shove it in the container and run it under k8.