Comment by gf000

20 hours ago

As opposed to what problem?

Like I can honestly have trouble listing too many business problems/areas that would fail to scale with their expected user count, given reasonable hardware and technical competence.

Like YouTube and Facebook are absolute outliers. Famously, stackoverflow used to run on a single beefy machine (and the reason they changed their architecture was not due to scaling issues), and "your" startup ain't needing more scale than SO.

Scaling to a lot of reads is relatively easy, but you get into weird architectural territory once you hit a certain volume of writes. Anything involving monitoring or real-time event analysis can get hairy. That's when stuff like kafka becomes really valuable.