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I'm feel like I could write another post: Do you even need serverless/Cloud because we've also been brainwashed into thinking we need to spend hundreds/thousands a month on AWS when a tiny VPS will do.

Similar sentiment.

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id 100% read that post. the jump from free tier serverless to why is my aws bill $400 this month for a hobby project is a rite of passage at this point. a $5 hetzner or digitalocean box with dokku/docker-compose is basically a superpower that most newer devs just bypass entirely now.
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You are both right, with the exception that it requires knowledge and taste to accomplish, both of which are in short supply in the industry.

Why setup a go binary and a json file? Just use google forms and move on, or pay someone for a dead simple form system so you can capture and commmunicate with customers.

People want to do the things that make them feel good - writing code to fit in just the right size, spending money to make themselves look cool, getting "the right setup for the future so we can scale to all the users in the world!" - most people don't consider the business case.

What they "need" is an interesting one because it requires a forecast of what the actual work to be done in the future is, and usually the head of any department pretends they do that when in reality they mostly manage a shared delusion about how great everything is going to go until reality hits.

I have worked for companies getting billions of hits a month and ones that I had to get the founder to admit there's maybe 10k users on earth for the product, and neither of them was good at planning based on "what they need".

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Serverless is cheap as hell as low volumes. Your tiny VPS can't scale to zero. If you're doing sustained traffic your tiny VPS might win though. The real value in Cloud is turning capex spend into opex spend. You don't have to wait weeks or months to requisition equipment.
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> weve basically been brainwashed to think we need kubernetes and 3 different databases just to serve a few thousand users. gotta burn those startup cloud credits somehow i guess.

I don't think it makes any sense to presume everyone around you is brainwashed and you are the only soul cursed with reasoning powers. Might it be possible that "we" are actually able to analyse tradeoffs and understand the value of, say, have complete control over deployments with out of the box support for things like deployment history, observability, rollback control, and infrastructure as code?

Or is it brainwashing?

Let's put your claim to the test. If you believe only brainwashed people could see value in things like SQLite or Kubernetes, what do you believe are reasonable choices for production environments?

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i think you missed the "on day 1" part of my comment. k8s, iac, and observability are incrdible tools when you actually have the scale and team to justifiy them.

my point is strictly about premature optimizaton. ive seen teams spend their first month writing helm charts and terraform before they even have a single paying user. if you have product-market fit and need zero-downtime rollbacks, absolutly use k8s. but if youre just validatng an mvp, a vps and docker-compose (or sqlite) is usually enough to get off the ground.

its all about trade-offs tbh.

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