Why Your Distributed System Is Slower and More Expensive Than a Laptop

Distributed System Is Slower Than a Laptop

I show how companies waste millions on complex distributed systems when a single laptop could handle the workload faster and cheaper. By analyzing real-world costs from Kafka and Flink clusters, I reveal that most businesses never reach the scale where distribution pays off. The industry reflex to over-engineer creates massive overhead in compute, engineering time, and incidents that simple, single-machine solutions avoid entirely.

"The distributed version is not a faster system that costs more; it is usually a slower system that costs more."