> Costs to architect systems that serve millions of request daily have gone down. Not up.
I never said serving millions of requests is more expensive. Protecting your servers is more expensive.
> Hell, I would be very curious to know the costs to keep HackerNews running. They probably serve more users than my current client.
HN uses Cloudflare. You're making my point for me. If you included the fixed costs that Cloudflare's CDN/proxy is giving to HN incredibly cheaply, then running HN at the edge with good performance (and protecting it from botnets) would costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
> People want to chase the next big thing to write it on their CV, not architect simple systems that scale. (Do they even need to scale?)
Again, attacking your own straw men here.
Writing high-throughput web applications is easier than ever. Hosting them on the open web is harder than ever.
From the ping output, I can see HN is using m5hosting.com. This is why HN was up yesterday, even though everything on CF was down.
> Writing high-throughput web applications is easier than ever. Hosting them on the open web is harder than ever.
Writing proper high-throughput applications was never easy and will never be. It is a little bit easier because we have highly optimized tools like nginx or nodejs so we can offset critical parts. And hosting is "harder than ever" if you complicate the matter, which is a quite common pattern these days. I saw people running monstrosities to serve some html & js in the name of redundancy. You'd be surprised how much a single bare-metal (hell, even a proper VM from DigitalOcean or Vultr) can handle.
Hell, I would be very curious to know the costs to keep HackerNews running. They probably serve more users than my current client.
People want to chase the next big thing to write it on their CV, not architect simple systems that scale. (Do they even need to scale?)