[luchadorvader]

grep is simple to use from a simple command. Setting up a Java server and maintaining it is quite a different challenge then running a command with a few parameters. I wouldn't use it because if it goes down, fuck. If I need to extend it or decide to change something in there, fuck. I would want to use something that is easier for me to fix and maintain or my coworkers to fix/maintain, then have a product built from multiple languages that require too many different types of people to keep it running.

[treehau5]

I wasn't suggesting you do something that would place a large burden on your coworkers, but there is a point where the usefulness of existing software is greater than any potential churn of learning it's running environment.

Suppose you were a ruby developer and you want to create a fully scalable, highly available JSON document store that you can easily index, store, and backup/rotate, and a solution like this wasn't available in your language. Would you create your own database to store the documents, implement your own consensus algorithms and searching algorithms like TL-DF?

Or would you just learn how to use elasticsearch and incur the cost of running it?

[ben_jones]

Yup. It goes far beyond the effort taken to run it. Straight out of the preface of Site Reliability Engineering, a book written by Google SREs, "estimates 40-90% of the total costs of a system are incurred after birth".

Edit: This was meant to go under one of your post's child comments, and hopefully isn't too out of context misplaced here.

[sesm]

If a Java web application is packaged properly, then running it as simple as 'java -jar myapp.jar'.