Small is beautiful: microstacks or megadependencies

In this talk Bert showcases his parliamentary monitoring system https://opentk.nl to discuss the tradeoffs between running on a microstack, of a few cheap software components, and taking seven-league boots using cloud services to run services. A microstack solution may be more work up front, but you can later take it anywhere. And if you ever scale bigly, it will save you a lot of money. Meanwhile, it is a lot easier to find staff that can build stuff based on ready to use cloud services, and you get a lot of capabilities baked in.

Also, as the geopolitical climate heats up, it may become a bigger item what your dependencies are, and where you send your private customer data.

As always, there is a balance, but after this talk you should have a better developed feeling about where this balance lies. And crucially, have a good think on who is making these choices, and how.