Scaling horizontally is well and good (since my unit of input is large and I get a lot of them, I just use autoscaling groups in AWS to achieve much the same),

Scaling horizontally is well and good (since my unit of input is large and I get a lot of them, I just use autoscaling groups in AWS to achieve much the same), but I don’t want to pay for 10 systems slowly doing what 1 could do with fast software. Especially, while 1 system has a hard ceiling, there’s a lot of headroom on 1 system when you achieve mechanical sympathy with the cache hierarchy, memory controller, and disk.