> A handful of grumpy old gits know that if you pick the right languages, and the right tools, you can build something to replace this 2nd level system in the same types of tools as the first level system, and that you don’t need all the fancy scaling infrastructure because one modern box can support a million concurrent users no problem, and a few such boxes can support tens of hundreds of millions of them, all in something in the corner of one room, with an uptime of decades and no need for any cloud.

I suppose I am a grumpy old git, then, although I did not think of myself that way until recently. In the past decade or two, I've seen computer science lose its collective appreciation of the staggering potential of hardware. This has steadily resulted in software being built with tremendously over-engineered, hyper-complicated, cloud-first architectures that barely match the throughput of a single box running a high-performance platform (and for the record, "high performance" can still be relatively ergonomic via Java, C#, Rust, and so on).

The scale of hardware, clock cycles, bits per second of bandwidth, etc., being squandered on modern cloud-first highly complicated architectures boggles the mind.

I fear there is no strength behind any pendulum swing back to architectural simplicity, appreciation of the available capacity of hardware and how to use it, and local-first.