[argd678]

The biggest scaling issue I always run into is the database is the bottleneck and there’s not a lot of options for most databases to auto scale them.

[brianwawok]

Yup. Your DB usually has to be over-provisioned for peak WRITE capacity.

Read capacity is easy to skill to infinity with caches. But if a DB can only write 1000 updates per second, nothing will change that.

In many cases - it's ok to not process EVERYTHING right away. Process the important stuff RIGHT AWAY. Slowly process the unimportant stuff in your spare time.