Resume-Driven Architecture
Why are you building a tech stack fit for Google when you're not Google?
Google has a billion users. You have forty-seven.
Google needs Kubernetes orchestrating tens of thousands of nodes across continents. They built it because they had no choice. You ship a CRUD app for a regional logistics company. You have a choice. You picked Kubernetes anyway.
This is resume-driven architecture. It is paid in weeks of yak-shaving, in 3am pages, in onboarding documents nobody reads, in YAML.
The honest stack for most jobs is small. A single Go binary. Postgres. A reverse proxy if you must. Maybe a cron. Deploy it with scp and systemctl restart. It will serve more traffic than you will ever have, and when something breaks you can read the whole system in an afternoon.
But that does not look like work. That looks like cheating.
So we reach for Kafka because we might one day need event sourcing. We reach for microservices because the monolith is "unscalable," even though the monolith we are replacing has been running fine for eight years on one box. We reach for Redis because Postgres apparently cannot do a SELECT anymore. We reach for service meshes, sidecars, sagas, GraphQL federation, eventually-consistent everything, distributed tracing for an app with two endpoints.
Each of these had a real reason somewhere. None of those reasons are yours.
The tell is always the same: the system is more complicated than the problem it solves. Ten engineers running infrastructure built for a thousand. More time spent on the platform than on the product. New hires taking three months to ship a button.
A Go binary, a database, and an honest deployment script will outlive most of what gets stage time at GOTO. It will be debuggable at 3am. It will not require a quorum of cloud architects to change a config. It will ship.
The job is to deliver. Not to look impressive in a system design interview. Not to earn a stack worthy of an HN front page. Not to perform engineering.
Deliver.
If you are not Google, stop paying their bill.