You don't have a million users

I see this misdirection all the time; A team spins up a textbook microservice architecture on AWS for an internal dashboard that twelve people will use. They spend three weeks configuring security hub, and ingress rules, and cognito-Azure bridges, and zero days talking to the people actually using the tool.

They are designing for what's in fashion, not what they need. They are pretending they have millions of users. They don't.

Building locally forces you to remember what the cloud is actually for. When you work locally, development is fast. The feedback loop is instant. You aren't burning cycles debugging IAM roles or watching a CI pipeline spin for ten minutes just to see if a button changed color. You write the code, you save the file, you see the result.

This doesn't mean the cloud is bad. Real production workloads belong in the cloud. When you actually hit scale, when you have the active connections, the database reads, the sheer volume of traffic that requires horizontal scaling, the cloud is the only way to survive. Elastic infrastructure exists for a reason.

But you don't start there.

You build what you need right now. You start locally. You keep the architecture simple until the pain of keeping it simple is worse than the pain of making it complex.