Why is everything so scalable?

"the stack of every single company I've seen is invariably AWS/GCP with at least thirty microservices (how else will you keep the code tidy?), a distributed datastore that charges per query but whose reads depend on how long it's been since the last write, a convoluted orchestrator to make sure that you never know which actual computer your code runs on, autoscaling so random midnight breakages ensure you don't get too complacent with your sleep schedule."

"I don't know the exact point when everything went wrong, but I suspect it was somewhere in the 2000s, when Google introduced Map/Reduce and every developer thought "well that's cool, I'm going to base all our production code on that paradigm, and eventually I will hopefully understand how it works". We've been in "FAANG architecture by default" hell ever since."

Developers increasingly adopt FAANG-style stacks, using AWS/GCP, dozens of microservices, distributed datastores, orchestrators, and autoscaling. Teams often prioritize architectural elegance and scalability over validating product-market fit and securing revenue. Startups focus on solving engineering problems that are easier and more interesting to developers than addressing customer needs or business viability. Big-tech paradigms like Map/Reduce inspired widespread replication of complex designs without full understanding. The result is expensive, fragile systems that consume resources and attention while the core business risks failure due to insufficient focus on customers and sustainable funding.

Read at Stavros