Use One Big Server - Speculative Branches

The author of this post discusses the debate between monolithic vs. microservices, and how the real issue is whether distributed system architecture is worth the developer's time and cost overheads.

The article highlights that we live in a world of virtualization and most servers are a lot bigger and cheaper than we think.

The article examines the capabilities and costs of one server and argues that, for most web services, one server is generally enough, and using a few larger servers is better than using many small ones.

The drawbacks of using a single big server are availability, downtime, and correlated hardware failures, which can be addressed by running a primary and backup server and keeping them in different data centers.

The article concludes that using cloud architecture is good but can be expensive, and being cloudy should be considered based on the burstiness of the workload.