The allure of our industry to mime FAANG leaders might be one of the reasons we're at this stage. Most products could be safely run on simpler setups.

I suspect that VendorOps and complex tools like kubernetes are favored by complexity merchants which have arisen in the past decade. It looks great on resume and gives tech leaders a false sense of achievement.

Meanwhile Stackoverflow, which is arguably more important than most startups, is chugging along on dedicated machines.

1: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-arc...