[lliamander]

So, I definitely agree with this. Most of us don't have to do any thing at FAANG scale. But what counts as simple?

It's quite easy these days to deploy an app using AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, SNS, etc., all with a single Cloud Formation template. Is that simple? In one sense I've abstracted away a lot of the operational work that comes with self-hosted, but now I've intertwined (Rich Hickey might say complected) myself into Amazon's ecosystem.

Also, is a document store like DynamoDB, MongoDB, etc., simpler than a relational database like Postgres? On the one hand, a document database's interface is very simple compared to the complexity like SQL. On the other, that simplicity is generally considered a necessary sacrifice to scale. If you don't need to scale, why make the sacrifice?

Also, there can be simple things that are better at scaling. Elixir is a very nice scripting language like Ruby or Python, but it also has much better performance scaling (comparable with NodeJS or Go).