> Would definitely like to hear more about their dev environment, how it is different from prod, and how they handle the differences.

It's honestly quite boringly similar (hence why it's only vaguely alluded to in the article)

Take out DDoS-Guard/External LBs (no need for publicness of it), pick a cheap-o cloud provider to get niceties like quick rebuilding with Terraform etc, slap a VPC-like thing to make it a similar private network (do use a different subnet so copypasting typos across dev and prod are impossible) and scale down everything (ES node has 8 CPUs and 24GB ram in prod? It will have to do with 2vCPUs and 2GB RAM in dev)

One of the annoying things is you do want to test the replicated/distributed nature of things, so you can't just throw everything on a single-instance-single-host because it's dev, otherwise you miss out on a lot of the configuration being properly tested, which ends up a bit costlier than necessary

I think enterprise and more optimize for business flexibility and ability to A/B test very rapidly vs a finely crafted piece of efficiency, for better or worse. The people behind this probably do this for their day job, or are teens that are about to do it for their day job.

I agree with you. I mostly work in enterprise and understand that it has different needs and ROI requirements. However, my personal mindset is that computers and networks are really really fast now and it's a tragedy that most of these gains are nullified due to unoptimized layers of abstraction or over-architecting. So it's a welcome sight to read about well-designed infrastructure like this.

It happens because business are optimizing for resources that are ultimately more expensive or slower, which is staffing levels and the ability to respond to the market so the business can grow or survive longer. Inefficient computing architecture as a side effect is a worthwhile tradeoff in light of that to them.

But as a craftsman, it is definitely nice :)