[throwaway290232]

I sort of agree, but somebody already has to manage the "infrastructure" of their web apps, dns. They never mind adding more of their own home-grown services. If they used Kinesis instead that's another piece of infra to maintain. But you would never hear them say "what about Postfix instead". Regardless of infra, if it's new, they want to use it, even if something older and more boring would work better.

If I ever heard a dev at work say "No I won't use that new tech, it's too untested/I'll have to spend more time figuring out how to make it work well", I would shit my pants. Whereas if it's old tech, "it's not modern/I'll have to spend more time figuring out how to make it work well". It's practically software ageism...

[wruza]

You’re likely blinded by a “nodejs monkey developer” stereotype which prevents you to see that node is what everyone wanted back then. It’s very, very easy to create an http-based analog of any “traditional” service in node and to free yourself from learning all the shady details (which there is a lot) of configuring it and keeping it alive at all levels, were it based on traditional software. Node is extensible configurable networking itself, and http(s) is a quintessence of all text protocols. All that we wanted back then is available now in node at much finer granularity and much less configuration or headache. “They” spin up home-grown services because it is a natural one-page-boilerplate straightforward thing to do in node, not because of ageism or something similar.

I tell you that as someone who fiddled with sendmail.cf’s and other .conf’s way too much long before nodejs became a thing. Now it’s a relief.