Simpler systems are easier to scale than more complicated ones, for sure - but things like making sure that your database is easily shardable are often cheap (e

Simpler systems are easier to scale than more complicated ones, for sure - but things like making sure that your database is easily shardable are often cheap (even free) before you start, and might be extremely expensive later on -- I'm familiar with a project that eventually spent a few hundred thousand dollars on some high performance database (Oracle RAC or something, don't remember exactly), where -- if the database schema was shardable in advance -- they could have been ok with 10-20 cheap machines running MySQL. And I remember an earlier project that had to be completely rewritten in the early '90s because at the time, Oracle couldn't yet scale even throwing money at it (and DB2 reportedly could - but the required Mainframe was not an option). Simple is often best, yes. But not oblivious-to-the-future simple.