I never said it was applicable to them, in fact I said the opposite: > Obviously that ship has sailed for you, but I mean in the general sense. In the general

I never said it was applicable to them, in fact I said the opposite: > Obviously that ship has sailed for you, but I mean in the general sense. In the general sense, no, you don't need a distributed system. Even if you have billions of dollars worth of revenue - no, you don't need a distributed system. I know, because I've worked on monoliths that service hundreds of thousands of users and generate billions in revenue. If you're making YouTube, maybe you need a distributed system. Are you making YouTube? Probably not. You can, of course, choose to make a distributed system anyway. If you want to decrease your development velocity 1000x and introduce unbelievable amounts of complexity and risk.