> I don't think it's cheap to do early. The costs are in people writing, drawing, talking, and often debating, rather than doing iterations on a basic working s

> I don't think it's cheap to do early. The costs are in people writing, drawing, talking, and often debating, rather than doing iterations on a basic working solution, and the outcome usually doesn't really work and needs to be redone in a year or two when more information is available. It is, for vast majority of apps. All you need to do to make sure your app running on one server can be run on 10 i.e. using actual SQL transactions to manage data, not in-program-memory locks. Then you can just get fatter DB server and boom, you're 10x Above that, sure, the "bigger server" starts to be expensive so you might need to start thinking about sharding, or moving some data off to separate instance (separate search cluster for example), or adding cache here and there, or, eventually, rebuilding the core of it for performance but that's 100x territory