I did a programming project for a job interview recently at a company called Willowtree that makes iOS and Android apps for other companies.

It was a pretty simple project, basically wrap a rest API around some JSON data provided to you.

I ended up deploying mine to Google Cloud Platform onto a VM running Ubuntu and Apache, and they seemed rather concerned that I took that approach instead of leveraging some kind of containerization or PaaS approach.

My API definitely had problems, as I don’t have much back end experience, but I found it strange that they would look down upon deploying to a cloud VM. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that a VM hosted on AWS or Digital Ocean was the latest and greatest and it seemed like a logical choice for something that would only ever be used by about five people.