I once worked a job where I easily spent 4 times as much time fighting with Terraform files than actually writing features. This company got less than 1,000 hits per day. I think about this a lot
I've had gigs where it felt like the company was spending more time fighting self-inflicted consequences of their "best practice" "cloud-native" architecture than developing actual revenue-generating features.
So many problems they were dealing with would magically disappear if all the services were running on a single high-end physical machine (the scale didn't mandate anything bigger than that) with a standby one sitting in a different DC for redundancy purposes with incremental DB snapshots shipped to it every 15 mins.
The cloud-native, "modern" infra became a liability and impediment to business but too many people would lose face to admit it.
So many problems they were dealing with would magically disappear if all the services were running on a single high-end physical machine (the scale didn't mandate anything bigger than that) with a standby one sitting in a different DC for redundancy purposes with incremental DB snapshots shipped to it every 15 mins.
The cloud-native, "modern" infra became a liability and impediment to business but too many people would lose face to admit it.