[hrishios]

Agreed about scaling problems, but the examples you provided illustrate that, in my experience, there are still things you should be doing from the get-go.

Building things that don't scale is often taken to the extreme where it's nothing more than a few HTML pages strung together by self-rolled crypto and javascript. This might be good for idea validation (first couple of days), but it shouldn't persist past this point.

Understanding when the inevitable problems pop up and being able to solve them in reasonable enough time not to lose your users is - to me - not a nice to have problem. It's a showstopper that will turn egg on your face problems into fatalities.

Few things I would recommend are:

* Instrumentation - You don't need to go full ELK before you find product-market fit. Hell you can log everything, and with two users you can always read all the logs. But something is key. * Up and down scripts - How long will it take you to set up a new copy of the product? Do you have to trawl bash logs and have a team meeting to find out all the configs that need to be set up? * Load-testing - Again, nothing fancy. Just put curl on a bash loop and see where the system starts to hiccup. Once you have real users with complex data on real hardware you'll wish you profiled things, even slightly. * Instrumentation - I say it again because the sheer number of systems I've found on the verge of silent failure and user frustration because the errors weren't being propagated, be it from client side to server or from the logs to an alert, is massive. With modern SPAs it's easy to think everything works when all your users see is a blank page. * Please don't roll your own crypto. Unless you're working in a language that is 2 days old you really shouldn't need to or be doing this.

In short, if you're using HPAs and Kubernetes you've gone too far. But don't choose your instance size at random, be able to set up a new instance in an hour, and have at least 60% confidence that if there is an error you will know about it.