[BackBlast]

The cloud was principally designed 2005-2013 era where it was pretty reasonable for an average website to need to go multi system to support traffic spikes.

CPU hardware kind of stagnated 2014-2018, while SSDs took off. But the last 5 years we've seen some pretty massive improvements everywhere.

How many sites need more than 500 threads, 6TB of ram, and 100Gbit egress? Which you can get in a single system now.

Some do, certainly, but then we're talking about the tiny narrow edge on the upper end of the curve. Almost every new web system built today can fit on a single box, and can become massively profitable on that single box unless you unicorn out and need the new architecture which you can now afford. And... that should be the new default.

But... with the cloud, we're stuck with complex massively parallel services or people starting up on tiny rented instances that are, as you say, pocket calculator equivalents.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

yep, at most you might want 2 boxes for HA but you definitely don't have to start with that and it also depends on what you're doing.

I know some are going to argue that it's a slippery slope from that simple HA to DR and all the other complexities, and there's some truth in that, but that complexity can be controlled with explicit decision making. It's not obvious that a simple HA/DR story has to end up with modern day cloud architectures.