But when I need to choose between hiring 1 extra developer or paying similarly expensive hosting …

I can't agree more on this. Most products out there with medium to low traffic can be handled just fine like this. The cost of automation is often not worth the financial effort. There's a dangerous trend in putting microservices everywhere. Then having the same level of quality as a monolith requires an infinite amount of extra work and specialized people. Your product must be very successful to justify such expenses! My rule of thumb; monolith and PaaS as long as your business can afford to.

Where, oh god where, are there more sensibly thinking people like you! This is pragmatic and straight forward. There is very little room for technical make work nonsense in your described strategies. Most places, and many devs I meet cannot imagine how to do their jobs without a cornucopia of oddly named utilities they only know a single path of use.

What if I do this with Terraform using AWS Serverless and staying in the free tier for this workload that you are referencing instead of VMs and a load-balancer? I just don't see why people prefer the VM based approach over serverless.

Agree entirely. I think system design interviews are partly to blame because they select for people who think that the only way to design a system is the cargo cult method that system design interview prep books and courses preach, which is: - breaking everything into microservices - having a separate horizontally scalable layer for load balancing, caching, stateless application server, database servers - at least two different types of databases because it's haram to store key-value data in a RDBMS - sprinkle in Kafka queue layers and dead-letter queues in between every layer because every time you break one thing into two, you can have a scenario where one part is down while the other is still up - replicate that in 10 different datacenters because I'll be damned if a user in New York needs to talk to a server in Dallas And all this for a service that will see at most 10k transactions …

This is actually a really interesting post to me. I'm currently working at the opposite of a startup with a shoestring budget. We're a medium-sized company with 100 - 150 techies in there. As a unique problem, we're dealing with a bunch of rather sensitive data - financial data, HR data, forecast and planning data. Our customers are big companies, and they are careful with this data. As such, we're forced to self-host a large amount of our infrastructure, because this turns from a stupid decision into a unique selling point in that space. From there, we have about 7 - 12 of those techies working either in my team, saas operations, our hardware ops team, or a general support team for CI/images/deployment/buildserver things. 5 - 10% of the manpower goes there, pretty much. The interesting thing is: Your perspective is our dream vision for teams running on our infrastructure. Like - 1 & 2 &…

The only point I disagree with is Terraform. It is brilliant for this exact scenario because it's self documenting. When you do need to update those SPF records in two years time, having it committed as a Terraform file is much better than going through (potentially stale) markdown files. It's zero maintenance and really simple. Plus its ability to weave together different services (like configuring Fastly and Route53 from the same place) is handy, too.