The industry does fetishize large node counts and doesn't pay enough attention to per-node performance, or have a good sense of what is a reasonable resource fo

The industry does fetishize large node counts and doesn't pay enough attention to per-node performance, or have a good sense of what is a reasonable resource footprint for a given task. On the other hand planning for >1 node pushes you towards properties that are desirable for other reasons than scalability per se, such as a stateless app tier with a separate database, zero downtime deployment, incremental rollout, and change management by some less cowboyish means than interactive SSH. For those reasons I would probably prefer to start with something like N=3. Also, when it comes time to increase complexity budget and spend innovation tokens, people would often be better served by making a simple deployment topology multi-region than by making a single region very complex. Separate failure domains are great!