[kevinqi]

I work at a startup and most of the stuff in the article covers things we use and solve real world problems.

If you're looking for successful businesses, indie hackers like levelsio show you how far you can get with very simple architectures. But that's solo dev work - once you have a team and are dealing with larger-scale data, things like infrastructure as code, orchestration, and observability become important. Kubernetes may or may not be essential depending on what you're building; it seems good for AI companies, though.

[charred_patina]

How many people if I may ask? And how many TPS for your services? I am hoping I can get away with a simple monolith for a very long time.

[kevinqi]

30-40 people; not much TPS but we're not primarily building a web app; we have event-driven data pipelines and microservices for ML data.

If you're primarily building a web app, a monolith is fine for quite a while, I think. But a lot of the stuff in the post is still relevant even for monoliths - RDS, Redis, ECR, terraform, pagerduty, monitoring/observability.