And if you design your monolith carefully enough you might be able to horizontally scale too. Back in the late 00s we horizontally scaled a monolithic project

And if you design your monolith carefully enough you might be able to horizontally scale too. Back in the late 00s we horizontally scaled a monolithic project with 5mil daily users and another 8mil daily users. Peak was 10k and 15k requests/sec of dynamic per-user webpages. The hardest part was the databases. Our solution was standard for the time but pretty ugly nowadays: sharding MySQL by user id along with heavy use of memcached. Would have killed for some of the modern scalable databases. Sometimes I wonder if some people using microservices are chasing challenges since much of the actually necessary hard parts are already figured out.