[jostiniane]

you clearly have no idea how things work outside of hobby projects, what about reliability? scalability, guaranteed uptime, resolving incidences,... You can account for all for that for yourself by creating a mini cloud provider.. good luck with that

[Toutouxc]

Easy with the big words. All of that really depends on whether you're B2C or B2B, what kind of app it is and what kind of client. There's a company that has my code (Rails apps) running on Ubuntu Server VPSes with one guy who picks up the phone and restarts the server if something goes wrong (i.e. once a year). And the clients are multi-million businesses.

[jostiniane]

Yeah, common primitive sense is "big words". You understand that competitiveness and cloud certificatios based on some sort of a measurements of those "big words". I wonder how B2B or B2C is a decisive choice.

[CogitoCogito]

Half of the "robust" and highly complex solutions I see employing modern practices go down way more often than the simple version that the GP described.

[jostiniane]

Probably I don't know enough to argue, but those are the repeated arguments and which I agree with. In my current place, I know we can reduce the infra bill significantly if we move to renting physical servers or VPSs, but nobody would like to gamble on the "big words" (availability,..). We already have a system to deal with downtime in one region but it will take much more efforts that would lead to a minicloud if we want to go with the dedicated hosting.

[govolckurself]

What about those things? They're just glittering generalities, and an appeal to them is frequently used to justify adding ever more complexity to software.

The vast majority of startup web apps don't need anything more than a decent MVC framework (seriously, just use the web as designed) and a fast database. Keep a warm spare of your application running if a box goes down and you need to cut over or something. No, it's not sexy. No, they probably won't invite you to speak at Re:Invent. But your shit will work and it'll be cheap and FAST.

I've seen way too many basic CRUD apps, written by developers who mean well, needlessly overcomplicated in the name of things like "scalability" and "reliability". And guess what? They were some of the least scalable, least reliable applications. I'm talking applications where low double-digit requests per second for basic web pages caused the entire thing to shit itself.

So no, you don't actually need your own mini cloud provider to run a solid service. You just need to know what the hell you're doing.