That's great, if that's what you need. But most people aren't building a service like that. HN, I believe, runs on one machine, with a second for failover purposes. And HN still has many, many more users than typical company-internal services, community services, or at the extreme end personal services.

When you aren't operating at absurd scale, "Google-style" infrastructure doesn't do you any favors. But the industry sure wants to convince us that scalability is the most important property of infrastructure, because then they can sell us complicated tech we don't need and support contracts to help us use it.

(Disclosure: I'm the lead developer of https://sandstorm.io, which is explicitly designed for small-scale.)