Based on my past experiences, I'd be happy to take an even money bet that more than 95% of organizations that go distributed for performance reasons actually ca

Based on my past experiences, I'd be happy to take an even money bet that more than 95% of organizations that go distributed for performance reasons actually caused themselves more problems than they solved. This does NOT mean that there are no use cases for distributed - I've seen Google's internals and it would be impossible to do that any other way. But it does mean that when someone is telling you with a straight face that they needed horizontal scalability for performance, you should assume that they were probably wrong. (Though probably saying that is not the wisest thing - particularly if the person you're talking to is the architect whose beautiful diagrams you'd be criticizing.) So yes, there are problems that require a distributed architecture for performance problems. That doesn't contradict the point that every other option should be explored first.