I believe that most of the comments complaining about overspecing the runtime mentioned in this article (if at all, I find it reasonable), are extrapolating on their experience and referring to a general problem of overspecing in the industry.<p>1. Whenever I see a new company's/project's runtime, I have come to expect a massively overcomplicated system that is "built to scale". But ends up costing a lot and taking way too much time from product-development. A real issue with this is that when looking at the project's feasibility to actually do scale, the runtime-cost will be estimated to a multiple of the current runtime cost which will appear larger than if the systems were built to handle the current load.<p>2. To me, this seems like a failure of cloud computing, which has a very compelling promise of letting you start with small servers, then easily switch up to bigger servers when needed. This was, in fact, hard before cloud.<p>3. The biggest issue I have with overspeced and overly complex deployments, is that to me it appears like (novice) developers is led to believe that they have to do the job in a complicated way. Look at a typical tutorial from the big and trend-setting players how something should be deployed. The first hit on my favourite search engine for a "Hashicorp Vault deployment" [1] recommends using nine hosts. I know from experience that it runs fine on ONE host of the smallest kind I could find for our non-trivial use-case. Also, in that use-case it doesn't matter that it is not HA, because it has turned out to be more stable than any of our other stuff, and can be restarted in a less than a minute. (I wouldn't mind at all, if the actual motivation for a large deployment was: "it is fun this way" or "we do this for our own training and experience" or "we choose to do it this way because of specific requirements" or anything of the sort.)<p>4. It seems to me that, what is needed is enough experience and courage to say: let's do our deployment and setup in a simple way that will work, because we know that we are competent to solve scale issues when they appear and we are not building ourselves into a corner. Also, we can afford to take responsibility if scaling problems do occur because we did not follow industry "recommendations" (i.e. trends).<p>[1] <a href="https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/deployment-guide" rel="nofollow">https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/deployment-guide</a><p>Edit:
- clarified HA needs in point 3