[fatnoah]

When my startup was acquired a few years ago, our infra was hosted at AWS, but most of our "cloud features" were used more for monitoring, alerting, and dashboarding. The real work was done by Windows/SQL and .NET app code. Ours was a messaging application that we tested to support about 350 messages/second, and we had to integrate with the "big co" backend after we were acquired. The bigco back-end could handle about 3-5 messages/second.

Our main production "infra" was a load-balanced pair of medium CPU front-end servers and a high-memory back-end for the SQL server. Theirs was approximately 20x the size, and a more "traditional" cloud microservices, etc. infrastructure. Optimization makes all the difference. So many of the "extras" just add unnecessary complexity, just like avoiding those "extras" probably does when they actually are required.