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Add 'what would be overkill' section to architecture doc

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Pragmatic analysis of components that add cost/complexity without
value at startup scale, with guidance on when to introduce each.

Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
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- Artifact Registry + Secret Manager: ~$5
- **Total: ~$175–245/month**
### 6.1 What Would Be Overkill at This Stage
Not everything in a "best practices" architecture is worth implementing on day one. The following are valuable at scale but add cost and complexity that a startup with a few hundred users/day does not need yet.
| Component | Why it's overkill now | When to introduce |
|-----------|----------------------|-------------------|
| **Multi-region GKE** | Single region handles millions of req/day; multi-region doubles cost | When SLA requires 99.99% or users span continents |
| **Service mesh (Istio/Linkerd)** | Adds sidecar overhead, complexity, and debugging difficulty | When you have 10+ microservices with mTLS requirements |
| **Cross-region MongoDB replica** | Atlas M10 with multi-AZ is sufficient; cross-region adds ~2x DB cost | When RPO < 1 hour is a compliance requirement |
| **Dedicated observability stack** | GKE built-in monitoring + Cloud Logging is free; Prometheus/Grafana adds ops burden | When team has > 2 SREs and needs custom dashboards |
| **4+ GCP projects** | 3 projects cover prod/staging/shared; more adds IAM and billing complexity | When compliance (SOC2, HIPAA) requires strict separation |
| **API Gateway (Apigee, Kong)** | GKE Ingress handles routing; a gateway adds cost and latency | When you need rate limiting, API keys, or monetisation |
| **Vault for secrets** | GCP Secret Manager is cheaper, simpler, and natively integrated | When you need dynamic secrets or multi-cloud secret federation |
**Rule of thumb:** if a component doesn't solve a problem you have *today*, defer it. Every added piece increases the monthly bill and the on-call surface area.
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## 7. High-Level Architecture Diagram