Notes — Infrastructure & Systems

The Economics of Infrastructure: Why Managed PaaS Crushes Student Budgets

Aug 2026 5 min read Infrastructure & DevOps

Current Setup vs Planned Setup Infrastructure Diagram

Eruscent and ResuMaxxing are live, but I realized this week that real traffic would completely crush our budget. The catch? The code isn't the problem.

Spring Boot and FastAPI can handle concurrent load just fine. The bottleneck isn't the architecture — it's the economics.

Railway's Hobby plan can scale to meet real traffic, but it uses usage-based billing, so you pay per unit of CPU, RAM, and egress. My monthly bill would spike right along with my traffic.

Down the Infrastructure Rabbit Hole

That realization sent me down an infrastructure rabbit hole. I'm sharing what I learned, not as a "here's a tutorial," but as "here's my current understanding, feel free to correct me":

VPS vs. Managed PaaS

A VPS solves the cost-efficiency problem. You get predictable, dedicated hardware for a flat fee. The tradeoff is you configure everything yourself, unless you use something like Coolify to simplify it.

Docker Containers

Packages your backend into a container so you can run it consistently anywhere without host-level dependency conflicts.

Kubernetes (K8s)

I used to think K8s was mainly about rerouting traffic when something crashes (load balancing). Turns out, it's the full orchestrator that decides where containers run, restarts dead nodes, and handles automatic scaling.

Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling

Horizontal means adding more containers or servers. Vertical means making one server stronger (more CPU/RAM).

The Scaling Realization

The part that clicked for me: you don't just pick one over the other based on preference. You look at what is actually bottlenecked. Server maxed out with room left in the container? Scale vertically. Need redundancy so one crash doesn't take the whole app down? Scale horizontally.

Where I landed for now: Skip Kubernetes — it's overkill at our current scale. Get a real VPS (Hetzner / DigitalOcean). Start vertical, and go horizontal when traffic actually forces it.

Closing Reflection

As a 3rd-year Computer Engineering student, I'm trying to build the habit of catching problems before they hit production rather than after. But I also know premature optimization is a trap.

Senior engineers: am I overengineering this by moving to a VPS now, or is it the right move to secure predictable infrastructure costs before real traffic hits?

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