Comment by throwaway894345

I'm pretty happy to pay a cloud provider to deal with managing databases and hosts. It doesn't seem to cause me much grief, and maybe I could do it better but my time is worth more than our RDS bill. I can always come back and Do It Myself if I run out of more valuable things to work on.

Similarly, paying for EKS or GKE or the higher-level container offerings seems like a much better place to spend my resources than figuring out how to run infrastructure on bare VMs.

Every time I've seen a normal-sized firm running on VMs, they have one team who is responsible for managing the VMs, and either that team is expecting a Docker image artifact or they're expecting to manage the environment in which the application runs (making sure all of the application dependencies are installed in the environment, etc) which typically implies a lot of coordination between the ops team and the application teams (especially regarding deployment). I've never seen that work as smoothly as deploying to ECS/EKS/whatever and letting the ops team work on automating things at a higher level of abstraction (automatic certificate rotation, automatic DNS, etc).

That said, I've never tried the "one big server" approach, although I wouldn't want to run fewer than 3 replicas, and I would want reproducibility so I know I can stand up the exact same thing if one of the replicas go down as well as for higher-fidelity testing in lower environments. And since we have that kind of reproducibility, there's no significant difference in operational work between running fewer larger servers and more smaller servers.