If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn't work, and the business opportunity would be lost.
However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business.
That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.
Indeed it is a terrible idea to optimise any piece of software that's put online in the rare occurrence it becomes the next Facebook. No, it will not happen overnight. No, you can run on an autoscalable k8s on AWS setup and it will still break, you will have to completely re-architecture and write a lengthy "what went wrong" post-mortem anyway.
I feel the "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" mantra is not yet being taught in DevOps school.
Begone, Satan!
> That is why business leaders pick the more expensive 'best practice' setup.
Realistically, how many companies reach the scale of FB? If successful, they'll reach a few thousand concurrent users, which can be serviced by the monolith model, and even scaled traditionally. HN is a testament of how well this model can work.
Building an entire infrastructure around the 1e-9% chance it will have to service a FAANG-level scale of traffic is the definition of premature optimization.
Instead, setting up and maintaining this HA infrastructure is a huge resource sink, which at an early stage of a startup can make or break the project.
It's insane that this model of building for burstable scale where everything is a microservice has become so prevalent in the industry. Cargo culting whatever tech is produced by FAANGs is doing immeasurable harm. These are not best practices.
EDIT: Ah, if you were being sarcastic... Touché.
I know you're probably being /s but just in case ... all they'd need to do as a stop-gap hack whilst they worked it through is spin up another couple of servers and stick a load-balancer in front. If it does have a filesystem back-end then move that into cloud or network storage. Not ideal, but it would probably survive long enough for a more thought-through solution to arrive.