Comment by koito17

In 2015, a single server with 40 cores and 128 GB of RAM was able to handle 2 million WebSocket connections running an Elixir program[0].

One of my hot takes is that a gaming PC has fast enough hardware to serve thousands of clients with a static Rust binary and SQLite. Pair with Litestream, and you have easy-to-test, continuous backups. It's nice being able to test backups by just running `litestream restore` and then running a single binary on my development machine. Addtionally, when the backend is a single static binary, you gain the opportunity to test the entire system in CI without maintaining an ad-hoc cloud environment or heirarchy of mock services.

The points of contention, for me personally, would be managing deployments and observability.

Of course, at my workplace, I wouldn't dare to suggest this kind of architecture, but as others have mentioned, a single machine can go a long way, and I doubt most my projects will ever need to scale beyond 40 cores and 128 GB of RAM.

[0] https://x.com/chris_mccord/status/659430661942550528