Of course it always depends, but my experience is people reach for distributed systems when they can simply run a single node. If you can run a single node, an

Of course it always depends, but my experience is people reach for distributed systems when they can simply run a single node. If you can run a single node, and it meets all your business requirements, then I’d argue that is simpler than having to manage the very challenging problems inherent in distributed systems. A simple web app can run 100k+ connections per second with latency in the 100s of microseconds. This is 2 orders of magnitude better than most apps need. If you want durability you can use a service like RDS which takes care of replication and backups for you. That’s my advice anyway.