[mannykannot]

I had the same reaction... this statement seems to be an over-generalization, but it can be resolved by being careful about what 'premature' means. In this case, "we can trivially shard datasets of different projects over different servers, because they are all independent of one another", so it seems the scaling issue had a solution from the outset.

Warnings about the risks of premature optimization should not stop people thinking about issues that are likely to arise in future, and what they might do about them. On the other hand, this does not mean that you should necessarily implement that solution now.