“Despite an exponential increase in computing power, our applications require more machines than ever because of architectural decisions made 25 years ago.”
The standard web stack is an app server, a database server, Redis, a connection pooler, Kafka and Kubernetes to herd them. Most apps would fit on one box with SQLite. The missing piece was getting the data off that box when it dies. Litestream streams it to S3. The cloud vendors would rather you didn’t notice how little you need.