Reading DHHs musings on technology and running services always is a good way to start a day. This one is no different:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/keeping-the-lights-on-while-leaving-the-cloud-be7c2d67
The magic of Basecamp 2’s incredible two-year 100% uptime, as well as all the other applications hitting 99.99%, come in part from picking boring, basic technologies. We run on F5s, Linux, KVM, Docker, MySQL, Redis, Elastic Search, and of course Ruby on Rails. There’s nothing fancy about our stack, and very little complexity either. We don’t need people with PhDs in Kubernetes or specialists in exotic data stores. And neither do you, most likely.
But programmers are attracted to complexity like moths to a flame. The more convoluted the systems diagram, the greater the intellectual masturbation. Our commitment to resisting that is the key ingredient in this uptime success.
Quite a strong wording in this conclusion but generally it's hard to disagree here. Just too many people throw in too much external and third-party complexity for the sake of it, stuff they don't completely know or understand, because that's "how you do it these days". In the end, still, reliability, stability, security of a system in day-to-day operations to quite some degree depends on whether (or not) people know how to handle their environment in as much detail as possible.