[masterj]

> I bet you could get very very far on a single box,

With single instances topping out at 20+ TBs of RAM and hundreds of cores, I think this is likely very under-explored as an option

Even more if you combine this with cell-based architecture, splitting on users / tenants instead of splitting the service itself.

[immibis]

Single instance is underappreciated in general. There's a used server reseller near me, and sometimes I check their online catalogue out of curiosity. For only $1000ish I could have some few generations old box with dual socket 32-core chips and 1TB of RAM. I don't have any purpose for which I'd need that, but it's surprisingly cheap if I did. And things can scale up from there. AWS will charge you the same per month that it costs to get one of your own forever - not counting electricity or hard drives.

[switz]

I run my entire business on a single OVH box that costs roughly $45/month. It has plenty of headroom for growth. The hardest part is getting comfortable with k8s (still worth it for a single node!) but I’ve never had more uptime and resiliency than I do now. I was spending upwards of $800/mo on AWS a few years ago with way less stability and speed. I could set up two nodes for availability, but it wouldn’t really gain me much. Downtime in my industry is expected, and my downtime is rarely related to my web services (externalities). In a worst case scenario, I could have the whole platform back up in under 6 hours on a new box. Maybe even faster.

[Fnoord]

I guess you got cheap power. Me too, but not 24/7 and not a whole lot (solar). So old enterprise hardware is a no-go for me. I do like ECC, but DDR5 is a step in the right direction.