[tzone]

High availability + uptime is now necessary for any business no matter how small. If you need to run 24/7 available high uptime services you can’t avoid distributed systems one way or another. (Distributed systems vary by complexity of course but anything that has some failover type of mechanism is going to be a distributed system )

Also, industry is now transitioning where even small business might need geo distribution , not just for compute but also for data. That is going to make distributed systems even more complex even for the small guys.

Cloud services have made a lot of this stuff easier for average Joe but you can’t really avoid dealing with at least some fundamental concepts of distributed systems

[adevx]

Not sure I agree. My Hetzner vps has less downtime than some AWS regions. To be honest, I have yet to experience any downtime from them over multiple years. There is a good chance you introduce more potential downtime by blowing up the complexity with a distributed system.