Dan Luu:

Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed us to scale to this size while engineers mostly focus on work that delivers value to users.

Despite the unreasonable effectiveness of simple architectures, most press goes to complex architectures. For example, at a recent generalist tech conference, there were six talks on how to build or deal with side effects of complex, microservice-based, architectures and zero how one might build out a simple monolith… Larger conferences are similar; a recent enterprise-oriented conference in SF had a double digit number of talks on dealing with the complexity of a sophisticated architecture and zero on how to build a simple monolith.

He goes on to describe boring choices they’ve made and counter-balances that some by also describing why they’ve made some more complex choices such as GraphQL and Kubernetes. An excellent, nuanced piece.