In defense of simple architectures
There are some web apps still in production that I wrote almost a decade ago in Node+Express in the simplest, dumbest style imaginable. The only dependencies are Express and some third-party API connectors. The database is an append-only file of JSON objects separated by newlines. When the app restarts, it reads the file and rebuilds its memory image. All data is in RAM.<p>I figured these toys would be replaced pretty quickly, but turns out they do the job for these small businesses and need very little maintenance. Moving the app to a new server instance is dead simple because there&#x27;s basically just the script and the data file to copy over, so you can do OS updates and RAM increases that way. Nobody cares about a few minutes of downtime once a year when that happens.<p>There are good reasons why we have containers and orchestration and stuff, but it&#x27;s interesting to see how well this dumb single-process style works for apps that are genuinely simple.