Comment by tracker1

Exactly.. it was a lot different when a typical server was 2-4 CPUs and costs more than a luxury car... today you get hundreds of simultaneous threads and upwards of a terabyte of ram for even less, not counting inflation.

You can go a very, very, very long way on 2-3 modern servers with a fast internet connection and a good backup strategy.

Even with a traditional RDBMS like MS-SQL/PostgreSQL, you aren't bottlenecked by the 1-2ghz cpu and spinning rust hard drives. You can easily get to millions of users for a typical site/app with a couple servers just for a read replica/redundancy. As much as I happen to like some of the ergonomics of Mongo from a developer standpoint, or appreciate the scale of Cassandra/.ScyllaDB or even Cockroach... it's just not always necessary early on, or ever.

I've historically been more than happy to reach for RabbitMQ or Redis when you need queueing or caching... but that's still so much simpler than where some microservice architectures have gone. And while I appreciate what Apollo and GraphQL bring to the table, it's over the top for the vast majority of applications.