Its difficult to "guess" ahead of the fact how you are going to scale for the next 10x, because you need to know. a.) Which component is going to start breakin

Its difficult to "guess" ahead of the fact how you are going to scale for the next 10x, because you need to know. a.) Which component is going to start breaking, and that depends on the usage pattern. b.) Which business/tech compromises are ok to make, and that depends on a.) Generally speaking though, you'd try to benchmark the system to find the bottleneck component, and based on the nature of it, either try to throw more hardware (horizontal or vertical scaling) or optimize the software.