>"try all the common vertical scale-up approaches and tricks. Try to avoid using derivative Postgres products, or employing distributed approaches, or home-brew

>"try all the common vertical scale-up approaches and tricks. Try to avoid using derivative Postgres products, or employing distributed approaches, or home-brewed sharding at all costs – until you have, say, less than 1 year of breathing room available." Very healthy approach. I've always followed the idea of vertical scalability when writing my modern C++ app servers with local Postgres. Since I do not sell those to FAANG I've never failed finding decent very reasonably priced piece of hardware be it dedicated hosting or on prem that would not satisfy client's need for any foreseeable future. More then that. I've never needed even top of the line hardware for that. I concentrate on features and robustness instead. Using C++ also gives nice speedup.