[torginus]

Honestly most of the stuff I do is internal facing tooling with usually less than 100 concurrent and 1k peak users. For those, managing a server or two, or god forbid, a small autoscaling cluster is not a hassle.

For high-scale operations, you need to think real hard about how you do things and usually simplicity is key, and trying to do a little as possible on the high throughput parts is useful.

The costs do add up when you have professionals maintaining your Cassadra/Kafka boxes, but the same degree of complexity exists on AWS, when you try to weave together a tapestry of EC2s, lambdas, various storage services, with all the delicious complexity of multiple VPCs and networking fineries while not blowing the budget.

It's a different skillset, but not less work.