How Simple Is "As Simple As Possible"?
summary
Argues for building the smallest thing that works: cut 17 Git repos and 14 microservices down to one repo and one API and ship in two weeks, prefer one API endpoint before over-architecting, use JSON over HTTP for public APIs and gRPC between internal services for performance, prefer server-rendered HTML with HTMX or tiny JS fragments instead of 10–50 MB SPA runtimes, run minimal container images (serverless/container instances) not Kubernetes unless you truly need it, and replace a £45,000/month Cosmos DB anti-pattern with blob storage to drop costs to ~£1,500.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 7:59Microservices complexity myth
- 15:53Modular vs distributed monoliths
- 21:13Design simplicity
- 28:47REST, gRPC, and OpenAPI
- 33:32Frontend JavaScript fatigue
- 44:40Kubernetes overengineering
- 51:55External services and databases
- 57:14Process management myths
- 1:02:16Summary
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