[vidarh]

I'm sure the upper end of our datasets won't stop growing for the foreseeable future. But a huge proportion of problems has growth rates well below the growth rate of RAM.

And for that matter, even when we can't stuff it in RAM, the boundaries of what we can do on a single server is also constantly pushed back thanks to SSDs. It's just a few years ago since I was unable to get read speeds of more than 6GB/sec out of a RAM disk. Today I have servers that easily do 2GB/sec out of NVMe SSDs.

It's not that we never need to go beyond a single server. But people often really have no concept of when they'll need to.