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I love fiddling around with servers but your CTO makes a perfectly good argument in the lack of other context, so I commend your being careful in constructing a

I love fiddling around with servers but your CTO makes a perfectly good argument in the lack of other context, so I commend your being careful in constructing an argument of your own. A lot of it depends on what you're actually doing, but for a B2B SaaS app you could potentially make an argument around vertical scaling. Nowadays you can spin up a 128 vCPU VM with 2TB memory on EC2 in minutes, so why bother having lots of separate smaller servers? I've seen people making this argument quite well recently, especially in relation to using things like SQLite instead of a networked RDBMS. But.. I can't see you making such an argument very convincingly unless you're heavily into ops or play with this sort of stuff on the regular, so I'd stick with your CTO's approach for now and keep alternative ideas in your pocket for hackathons, spare time, or prototyping sessions.

Sebb767 4y ago
> Nowadays you can spin up a 128 vCPU VM with 2TB memory on EC2 in minutes, so why bother having lots of separate smaller servers? For 3600$ [0] per month. Spending this kind of money makes sense if plan B is to spend man-years optimizing your app or if you have an insanely expensive per-machine license, but otherwise you are better off with multiple servers - not only for price, but especially for availability. [0] Assuming a c6a.32xlarge in us-east1, with only 256GB of RAM. Dedicated machines are more expensive.
- petercooper 4y ago
  Yeah, but you wouldn't start there. You'd have a 8.. 16.. 32GB VM or whatever with fewer vCPUs until you have thousands of paying customers. It's just that you can get there so vertical scaling becomes a good possibility.