> This is just slightly more complex than a static site
That's because their product is only slightly more complex than a static site.
I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days.
That's because their product is only slightly more complex than a static site.
I wish every project was as basic as a web server and database but it's pretty rare these days.
I feel like the overwhelming majority of web based software projects can be catered for with exactly this setup.
If it's rare it's because everybody's drunk the Kool-aid
Having a 1-2 day outage because your architecture is not highly-available across data centres like this one just doesn't cut it. And multi-day outages are very much real because of the thundering herd effect as companies rapidly try to move between data centres exhausting capacity.
And much of the complexity in modern day architectures come from high availability and security.
i.e. they would likely be sharing the same power and network infrastructure.
So not redundant by any normal definition.
Is it? What functionality are you thinking about that absolutely require more than that?
I find that most ideas even today can be solved with a web server + DB, while developers today like to over-engineer things and think about scaling a service for a million users while they haven't even figured out the value proposition of their product/service yet.
A lot of apps use an "AI" or "machine learning" component which usually just means a second heterogeneous internal service.
For a little bit larger companies it's pretty common to have a data analytics or data warehouse component.
In addition, a web server + database usually require some monitoring system. After you have more than a handful of servers, probably also log aggregation.
If you're just a single or handful of people working on something, you probably don't need any of that.
Once you get a little bigger (or downtime becomes expensive) those things get tacked on quickly.
What you're seeing is survivorship bias where the SaaS companies that are doing well are the ones that can provide a simple, clean UI whilst adding the functionality that you need for the product to be useful.