We spent six months architecting our system to handle 10 million concurrent users.
We deployed load balancers. We spun up auto-scaling groups. We implemented a distributed event bus. We spent $25,000 on cloud infrastructure in the first quarter.
On launch day, we got exactly 412 users.
We optimized for a disaster that never came.
In the tech industry, we suffer from the delusion that every startup is going to have the exact scaling problems of Netflix and Google.
We engineer for imaginary millions while ignoring the actual hundreds.
You do not need a highly distributed, decoupled architecture to serve a few hundred REST API calls a day. A single server running a boring monolith can handle more traffic than your startup will see in its first two years.
Build for the scale you have today. Rewrite for the scale you earn tomorrow.