Indeed. A single machine is often more than enough for early startups. It's easy for developers to understand and debug. What's important is to put the tooling

Indeed. A single machine is often more than enough for early startups. It's easy for developers to understand and debug. What's important is to put the tooling in place to make the deployment reproducible. Deploy using Terraform and Docker to the single VM. Avoid modifying things manually. That's what provides the agility to then scale the infrastructure into bigger shapes as needed. That's why we developed https://github.com/numtide/terraform-provider-linuxbox https://github.com/numtide/terraform-provider-linuxbox , to make that use-case even easier.