I suppose it could. I'm spoiled in that the places I have worked on micro-service architectures had either massive kubernetes clusters with 100s of services or were using ECS backed by EC2. I have an intermediate level understanding of those deployments, how to make them robust and scalable, etc.

After seeing the bill I even considered looking into a single instance deploy of multiple containers. Outside of running my own kubernetes cluster I was aware of some blog posts I had read on using docker compose for production. I have no production experience doing this so I don't know how to make it robust, secure, scalable, etc. I could learn.

But then I remembered a tip on optimization I learned while I was working in the video games industry. I was working with a guy who was focused on performance optimization. He told me that a common mistake junior engineers made when given optimization problems was that they would try to make the code faster as their first step. One way that is a mistake is to assume something is taking a lot of time without profiling first. But another mistake is to optimize a process that can be eliminated. He quipped: The fastest thing you can do is nothing at all.

So rather than optimize container deployments ... why not eliminate them? That honestly seems faster to me than trying to productionize a docker compose deployment just so I can say I am using micro-services. I mean, as this post and many others have mentioned - micro-services add complexity already. It seems more optimal to me to remove the micro-service complexity and save myself the hassle of fighting with docker compose or whatever other single-instance solution might exist.

And if I get solid ARR and I feel fine spending $1000/month on infrastructure, I'll probably just use a managed container hosting solution. I've split up a lot of apps into micro-services and in general it is very easy to do when needed.