Use One Big Server (2022)

A lot of the time businesses just aren't that important. The amount places I've seen that stress over uptime when nothing they run is at all critical. Hell you could drop the production environment in the middle of the day and yes it would suck and you'd get a few phone calls but life would go on.

These companies all ended up massively increasing their budgets switching to cloud workloads when a simple server in the office was easily enough for their 250 users. Cloud is amazing for some uses and pure marketing BS for others but it seems like a lot of engineers aim for a perfect scalable solution instead of one that is good enough.

I had a team member who would reiterate that during tough times. They come from much more consequential work, so they would often remark that at least nobody dies when we fuck up.