I am not a proponent of scaling out horizontally as the best solution to all things, but being able to do so comes as a result of design that helps to minimize

I am not a proponent of scaling out horizontally as the best solution to all things, but being able to do so comes as a result of design that helps to minimize coupling of services and single points of failure, in general, which are other benefits. But I also tend to think "you can always get a bigger box" can take you pretty far, and much further than most people that only think in terms of AWS realize.