[tluyben2]

I hate it when people act like every other project has different constraints. For most web projects that is simply not the case. Maybe in some cases there are small differences which won't be noticed by any run of the mill setup. If your constraints are different but you have 100 members and never more (like most startups) your constraints generally don't matter even if they are radically different. Most people here are overarchitecting for the "chance of becoming Facebook"; personally I rather make a lot more profit (from day 1) by using cheap stuff and simple setups and when we accidentally make it to Facebook size, we will revisit. We can move it to Amazon to keep running and in the meanwhile rearchitect. But chances are against us, and all of you here, that we will ever reach anything close to this. Even with investor money (just did 2 raises) we have better stuff to do.

[p_l]

Or maybe we're running a more complex infra not because of scaling, but because declarative setup free from expense of cloud services (esp. important outside of SV/rUSA bubble) can mean that hosting the services that are needed to run the project can be made cheaper, both in time and materiel.