You’ve built a masterpiece of microservices, orchestrated by Kubernetes and ready to scale to a million users. The problem? You only have one hundred. In the race to be “production-ready,” many founders accidentally build a labyrinth that slows them to a crawl.
The Hidden Complexity Tax
Kubernetes is a marvel of engineering, but for a seed-stage startup, it is often a full-time job masquerading as a tool. When your team spends more time debugging pod eviction policies and ingress controllers than talking to customers, you have lost your primary competitive advantage: speed. At this stage, every hour spent on infrastructure is an hour stolen from product-market fit.
The Power of the Monolith
A single, high-performance VPS can comfortably serve thousands of concurrent users. Modern hardware is exceptionally fast, and a simplified stack—using tools like Docker Compose or a basic systemd service—reduces mental overhead to near zero. You gain instant visibility, simplified networking, and a significantly lower cloud bill.
Conclusion
Scale is a high-class problem to have, but you cannot solve it until you first survive. Stop preparing for “web-scale” traffic that hasn’t arrived. Delete the cluster, migrate back to a single VPS, and reinvest that reclaimed energy into building features your users actually want.