Comment by kstrauser

First, yes, everything you said is true. And especially when you’re supporting an older application designed around such SPOFs, you need those to be bulletproof. That’s completely reasonable. That said, a fair chunk of my work since the 90s has been in building systems that try to avoid SPOFs in the first place. Can we use sharded databases such that upgrading one doesn’t take the others down? Shared-nothing backend servers? M-to-N meshes so we’re not shoving everything through a single load balancer or switch? Redundant data centers? The list goes on.

I don’t think that approach is inherently better than what you described. Each has its own tradeoffs and there’s a time and place for both of them. I absolutely did see a lot of Big Iron companies marketing their giant boxes as the “real, proven” alternative to a small cluster of LAMP servers, though. I don’t blame them for wanting to be big players in that market, too, but that wasn’t a good reason to use them (unless you already had their stuff installed and wanted to add a web service next to your existing programs).

I wouldn’t run a bank on an EC2 instance, but neither would I ever buy a mainframe to host Wordpress at any scale.