> but damn, if you actually make it - good luck scaling that up It's foolish to think that the initial version you make of any system is going to be the same t

> but damn, if you actually make it - good luck scaling that up It's foolish to think that the initial version you make of any system is going to be the same thing that you end up scaling to a million users and it's foolish to think that you're going to understand where your actual pinch points are going to be before that system is under any sort of pressure. Let alone before you really know what your product is really going to be (which is the situation most startups find themselves in). The slices you decide to make with the knife early on more often than not look stupid and burdensome once you're actually under pressure. Most people also underestimate how far it's possible to push monoliths. My favourite example is the OpenStreetMap infrastructure, which has to support thousands of concurrent users editing a global map that is ~105G when compressed. It's largely monolithic. And that doesn't really seem to be a problem. Works well. I suspect most people have never actually seen the sort of "heavy load" they talk about so much running on a sensibly designed monolith to the point that it's not coping due to its architecture. There's a lot of conceit around how big a load people really deal with.