12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets routed through CDNs. Logs are structured and passed to a SaaS which will have a custom search syntax that takes tens of seconds to search them poorly, and they'll get lost in the noise of all those components. You'll spend a non-trivial amount of time devising systems for tracing requests through all these components.
That sounds so spot on.
We do have a choice though. Static HTML, server-side templating, vertical scaling and /var/log still exist and work just fine. We don’t need to adopt the newfangled techniques unless the use case calls for them.
That sounds so spot on.
We do have a choice though. Static HTML, server-side templating, vertical scaling and /var/log still exist and work just fine. We don’t need to adopt the newfangled techniques unless the use case calls for them.