Profit in the Stack: Why We Need Low-Level Optimization

For the last decade, our industry mantra has been "Serverless First." We abstracted everything away to Managed Services to move fast, ship features, and let someone else handle the DevOps.

That strategy worked when money was free. It doesn't work when margins are shrinking.

We are now seeing a divergence in architectural needs:

1. Scale Out Fast: Use the cloud to prototype and find product-market fit.
2. Optimize for Profit: Once you have scale, the "cloud tax" becomes your biggest liability.

Owning the Stack End-to-End

To optimize for profit, you cannot treat your infrastructure as a black box. You need to understand:

• Hardware: How your keys interact with NVMe storage.
• Kernel: How your networking stack handles packet switching.
• Cost: The exact unit economics of a CPU cycle.

Developers need to "Shift Down." We need to be comfortable orchestrating our own resources, scaling our own clusters, and squeezing every ounce of performance out of the metal.

We shouldn't abandon the cloud, but we must stop using it as a lazy abstraction. The future belongs to the Full Stack Architect—one who knows the React frontend and the Linux kernel scheduler.

This post discusses themes from recent industry shifts towards hardware awareness.