[nobleach]

Yes, scaling horizontally can be quite expensive. For a startup that begins their journey with Rails, and finds out quickly how expensive that is, it can be a show stopper. Shopify and Stripe are used as an example simply because I want to agree that it is possible - given a ton of resources.

So, if I could tell you, that for your next startup, you could start with something that is easier and cheaper to scale (I find "a few more pods" very disingenuous as many benchmarks say otherwise), why would you choose something that requires a lot more resources? Because Rails is neat? I just don't see the allure at that point. It's why we're seeing companies like Podium, Divvy, PagerDuty move away from it. It's great to get a proof of concept out the door. So many stories are out there of folks that are moving away from it for their "next step".

[weatherlite]

We are not going to agree here probably. Another anecdote - because of our company's microservice/k8s architecture each dev works on their own k8s cluster. While some services are shared - most are not. That means we pay more for dev infrastructure than our production bill! So if optimizing infra from the start is the game - why is everyone doing micro services?