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by cbzoiav 1208 days ago
Your link is a guy saying people get so good with the old technologies that there is no point trying to compete with them. That only happens if they don't change much...

If you time traveled someone from a decade ago that knows how to configure an Apache or NGinx server to today they would likely still be able to. It may not follow latest best practice, but at worst they'll use something retired, have to google it and be up and running in minutes.

Same with Spring/Java or .NET/ASP.NET Web API.

And you can still run a VPS or container that can handle significant traffic for free on many of the cloud platforms + migrating it is much much simpler.

1 comments

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

My point is that you could make the whole "underlying technologies" argument for Apache back in the day when it was new. Why use Apache when I can understand the "underlying technologies"?

Things evolve over time and new tech slowly becomes so integrated into the stack that it is the underlying technology.

He even references webservers like Apache as part of this process: https://www.youtube.com/live/hWjT_OOBdOc?feature=share&t=765.

The underlying technologies very rarely change and offer very stable APIs. Apache has been around nearly 30 years. NGinX nearly 20. Both offered major advantages over existing solutions, but also interfaced with the rest of your codebase using a standard mechanism (CGI) so you could easily migrate to or from them.

A single vendors solution will not (at least very much should not) become a standard underlying technology, so this isn't moving to the next underlying technology. You're just tying yourself in to one vendor.

If it gets standardized across vendors or open sourced then it becomes a different story, but until then its a massive gamble to assume it will and the standard chosen will derive from your current vendors solution. Then what happens when the vendor decides to double prices and kill the free tier (also known as being acquired by Oracle)? deprecate it? Goes bust? etc.