[the8472]

> scalability

You can scale quite far vertically and avoid all the clustering headaches for a long time these days. With EPYCs you can get 128C/256T, 128PCIe lanes (= 32 4x NVMes = ~half a petabyte of low-latency storage, minus whatever you need for your network cards), 4TB of RAM in a single machine. Of course that'll cost you an arm and a leg and maybe a kidney too, but so would renting the equivalent in the cloud.

[synicalx]

It's all fun and games with the giant boxen until a faulty PSU blows up a backplane, you have to patch it, the DC catches on fire, support runs out of parts for it, network dies, someone misconfigures something etc etc.

Not saying a single giant server won't work, but it does come with it's own set of very difficult-to-solve-once-you-build-it problems.