Comment by mattbillenstein

I think more engineers would benefit from "you can just build stuff" thinking. Like you don't have to use all the complicated whizz-bang tech that everyone else is using.

You can build a boring backend on Linux VMs without containers using open-source software - it's simpler or at least a different level of complexity compared to the big clouds and orchestration systems like k8s, and honestly, it's just more fun to work on - I almost never write yaml - it's a joy.

I wrote my own deployment system using this idea - machines, roles, software and services that map to those roles, idempotent operations, and a constantly-connected async rpc system to orchestrate it all. Written from scratch in a language I like with a config language I like. My deploys are often < 10s (if I'm not waiting on webpack to build the UI) and all connect up to a chatops channel in Slack. I understand it because I wrote it all. Will it scale to infinity? Definitely not, but it's good enough for my uses.

So, I guess - just build stuff using simple primitives. Write simple software - modules and functions and a lot of stateless code. Use postgres for persistence - it's really that good. Use nginx and dns load balancing - tried and true simple architecture.