Now imagine your solution is not on a distributed system and go through that list. Centralized logging? There is nothing to centralized. Secrets management? There are no secrets to be constantly distributed to various machines on a network. Load balancing? In practice most people for most work don’t use it because of actually outgrowing hardware, but because they have to provision to shared hardware without exclusivity. Caching? Distributed systems create latency that doesn’t need to exist at all, reliability issues that have to be avoided, thundering herd issues that you would otherwise not have, etc.

So while there are areas where you need to introduce distributed systems, this repeated disparaging comment of “toy hobby projects” makes me distrust your judgement heavily. I have replaced many such installations by actually delivering (grand distributed designs often don’t fully deliver), reducing costs, dramatically improving performance, and most importantly reducing complexity by magnitudes.

Not to mention scaling. Most clients I know never, ever have scaled once. Ever. Or if they do, it's to save money.

One server means you can handle the equiv of 100+ AWS instances. And if you're into that turf, then having a rack of servers saves even more.

Big corp is pulling back from the cloud for a reason.

> Centralized logging? There is nothing to centralized.

It's still useful to have the various services, background jobs, system events, etc. in one indexed place which can also manage retention and alerting. And ideally in a place reachable even if the main service goes down. I've got centralised logging on a small homelab server with a few services on it and it's worth the effort.

> Load balancing? In practice most people for most work don’t use it because of actually outgrowing hardware, but because they have to provision to shared hardware without exclusivity.

Depending on how much you lose in case of downtime, you may want at least 2x of hardware for redundancy and that means some kind of fancy routing (whether it's LB, shared IP, or something else)

> Secrets management? There are no secrets to be constantly distributed to various machines on a network.

Typically businesses grow to more than one service. For example I've got a slack webhook in 3 services in a small company and I want to update it in one place. (+ many other credentials)

> Caching? Distributed systems create latency that doesn’t need to exist at all

This doesn't solve the need for caching results of larger operations. It doesn't matter how much latency you have or not, you still don't want that rarely-changing 1sec long query to run on every request. Caching is rarely only about network latency.

It sounds like you make a living doing stuff that has an incredibly small, ninja-like team, has a very low change rate, or is something that nobody really cares about. Things like RPO/RTO, multi-tenancy, logging, etc don't matter.

That's amazing. I wish I could do the same.

Unfortunately, I cannot run my business on a single server in a cage somewhere for a multitude of reasons. So I use AWS, a couple of colos and SaaS providers to deliver reliable services to my customers. Note I'm not a dogmatic AWS advocate, I seek out the best value -- I can't do what I do in AWS without alot of capital spend on firewalls and storage appliances, as well as the network infrastructure and people required to make those work.

Maybe I'm dumb. I am not even taking about distributed systems here. I'm taking about basic high availability configuration. Two web servers, two (or three) db server instances for HA. I have had paying enterprise customers from day 1, and I don't want them screaming at me for systems going down.

And as soon as you have two of anything, all the above start mattering.

If none of this actually is an issue for you and your customers, I'll say your are very lucky.