> You could think of building a scalable back end you don't actually need as a form of premature optimization I've heard this described as "solving the problem

> You could think of building a scalable back end you don't actually need as a form of premature optimization I've heard this described as "solving the problem you wish you had". A globally-distributed, scalable cloud infrastructure of microservices is good for the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, etc. because it solves problems they face: handling millions of hits in a timely manner; avoiding downtime, every second of which is user-visible, loses them money and damages users' confidence in their service; etc. It's very unlikely that a side-project will ever face these problems; an off-the-shelf Web server on an off-the-shelf host (say, Apache running on EC2) is probably fine. A side-project which isn't shipped will never face these problems, because it doesn't have any users, any uptime, any revenue, etc.