Wikipedia is often brought up in these discussions, but it's a really bad example.
To a vast majority of Wikipedia users who are not logged in, all it needs to do is show (potentially pre-rendered) article pages with no dynamic, per-user content. Those pages are easy to cache or even offload to a CDN. FOr all the users care, it could be a giant key-value store, mapping article slugs to HTML pages.
This simplicity allows them to keep costs down, and the low costs mean that they don't have to be a business and care about time-on-page, personalized article recommendations or advertising.
Other kinds of apps (like social media or messaging) have very different usage patterns and can't use this kind of structure.
> Other kinds of apps (like social media or messaging) have very different usage patterns and can't use this kind of structure.
Reddit can’t turn a profit, Signal is in financial peril. Meta runs their own data centers. WhatsApp could handle ~3M open TCP connections per server, running the operation with under 300 servers [1] and serving ~200M users. StackOverflow was running their Q&A platform off of 9 on prem servers as of 2022 [2]. Can you make a profitable business out of the expensive complex machine? That is rare, based on the evidence. If you’re not a business, you’re better off on Hetzner (or some other dedicated server provider) boxes with backups. If you’re down you’re down, you’ll be back up shortly. Downtime is cheaper than five 9s or whatever.
I’m not saying “cloud bad,” I’m saying cloud where it makes sense. And those use cases are the exception, not the rule. If you're not scaling to an event where you can dump these cloud costs on someone else (acquisition event), or pay for them yourself (either donations, profitability, or wealthy benefactor), then it's pointless. It's techno performance art or fancy make work, depending on your perspective.
To a vast majority of Wikipedia users who are not logged in, all it needs to do is show (potentially pre-rendered) article pages with no dynamic, per-user content. Those pages are easy to cache or even offload to a CDN. FOr all the users care, it could be a giant key-value store, mapping article slugs to HTML pages.
This simplicity allows them to keep costs down, and the low costs mean that they don't have to be a business and care about time-on-page, personalized article recommendations or advertising.
Other kinds of apps (like social media or messaging) have very different usage patterns and can't use this kind of structure.