> Almost by definition, any company that runs a cluster is probably dealing with TBs of data (otherwise they could probably run it on one machine). This doesn'

> Almost by definition, any company that runs a cluster is probably dealing with TBs of data (otherwise they could probably run it on one machine). This doesn't follow: 1) One reason to run a cluster is to use flaky commodity hardware instead of high-reliability specialized hardware. Note the transition from specialized hardware and computer rooms of the '80s and '90s to cloud computing on preemptible instances. 2) They might just be straight-up wrong / misguided. http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/15/COST.html http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/... As a professional developer I've seen tons of distributed systems that could be replaced by a well-designed non-distributed system, but ELK and Mongo and etcd and Kafka and more generally cloud servers are easy off-the-shelf tools.