Many teams are quietly building systems that appear to run half the internet while serving traffic that looks more like a neighborhood cafe. Microservices. Service meshes. Distributed tracing. Three databases and an event bus, all for a product with a few thousand users and a very modest-sized engineering team.
In my Simplicity-First essay, “You Are Not Google: Stop Copying Big Tech Architectures for Small Problems,” I argue that this is not ambition. It is unpaid cosplay. We copy conference diagrams from Google, Amazon, and Netflix without copying the one thing that actually makes those companies work at scale: brutal discipline around limits, ownership, and deletion.
The piece looks at what really happens when small teams import hyperscale patterns. Cognitive load explodes. Onboarding slows down. Incidents start to require a guided tour through a zoo of services and data stores. Everyone feels clever on architecture day and exhausted in production.
Then I flip the script. Instead of asking “How would Google do this,” the essay asks, “What is the smallest thing that would genuinely serve our users right now?” Sometimes the honest answer is one well-built application and one boring database. Sometimes you truly do need a separate service, but far less often than the industry makes it sound.
If your architecture diagram looks like a keynote slide while your revenue graph looks more like a side project, this one is aimed directly at you.
Read the full essay here:
