And just making your one database server bigger also scales a lot, there is nothing stopping you from adding a terabyte of RAM. Underrated developme

And just making your one database server bigger also scales a lot, there is nothing stopping you from adding a terabyte of RAM. Underrated development strategy. If your max envisioned workload won't exceed what a single server can reasonably handle, this is orders of magnitude easier&cheaper&performant than anything else. Additionally, I think a large percentage of the HN crowd underestimates what a single large-ish single server can handle these days. Probably because we are all used to only seeing tiny virtualized slices these days. 192+ threads, 2TB of RAM, terabytes of crazy fast PCIe storage. This was multiple racks of servers not too long ago, now in ~2U and it costs less than a car.