I'm running a crypto trading platform I'm developing on 30$ on DigitalOcean. I coded exclusively in Rust and recently added a dynamic interface to python. Today during the BTC crash it spiked at 20k events/s, and that's only incoming data.
This reminds me of back in 2003, a friend of mine worked for an online casino vendor; basically, if you wanted to run an online casino, you'd buy the software from a company and customize it to fit your theme.
They were often written in Java, ASP.NET, and so on. They were extremely heavyweight. They'd need 8-10 servers for 10k users. They hogged huge amounts of RAM.
My friend wrote the one this company was selling in C. Not even C++, mind you, just C. The game modules were chosen at compile time, so unwanted games didn't exist. The entire binary (as in, 100% of the code) compiled to just over 3 MB when stripped. He could handle 10k concurrent users on one single-core server.
I'm never gonna stop writing things in Python, but it still amazes me what can happen when you get down close to the metal.
OpenResty [1] is a good mix of these concepts. It serves requests through nginx (which is at its core just a lightweight event loop) and then serves pages through LuaJIT. If you need more speed you could always write an nginx module in C (or in some other language viz the C ABI).
Yeah currently for me there's no tool like Rust for performance, the borrow-checker isn't that complicated.
However, last month I started adding a python wrapper around the public api so I'm slowly going your way ;)
I use terraform and ansible, one droplet has monitoring (prom and grafana), 2 run services that currently run without any other infrastructure
The rest of the cost is a 250 gb space on DO
