[dan-robertson]

You can scale up that one machine a lot. If you start with a normal sized machine you have a lot of overhead in increasing ram/cpu on that machine (eg you could start with say 16 cores and 100G ram or less and scale up to like 2TB ram and 64/128 cores). There’s also runway for scaling things by eg shooting down certain long-running queries that cause performance problems or setting up read replicas.

So even if you’re a bit worried about scaling it, you can at least feel the problems are far away enough that you shouldn’t care until later.