Comment by iamlintaoz

If you need so many tricks to support the infra, it will eventually come back to bite you. I am pretty sure that Google in year 2000 could have supported their workloads with existing technologies (Yahoo could, and it was a much larger company). But they did GFS and Bigtable, and the rest is history. Other companies struggled to catch up due to inferior infrastructure. A visionary company needs to be prepared and should not be hindered by infrastructure. Can you scale the single primary system another 10x or more? Because their CEO said that they will scale their revenue by that much within just a couple of years.