[feoren]

#1 is more serious. #2 limits the growth of your already successful company. #1 sinks your struggling small business. You have to be successful to be a victim of your own success, after all. Not to mention the fact that #1 is way more common. Do you know how far Postgres scales? Because it's way past almost any medium- scale business.

[jvans]

Exactly. A lot of us work at #2 so we wish our predecessors saved us our current pain. But if they went that route we wouldn't be employed at that company because it wouldn't exist

[nfw2]

Exactly, if a medium-sized company is struggling with Postgres, either they have very niche requirements or the scalability problems are in their own code.

[derefr]

What about #1b: you have an overly-complex "system", but most of that "system" is serverless (i.e. managed architecture that's Somebody Else's Problem), with your own business-logic only being exposed to a rather simple API?

I'm thinking here of engineering teams who, due to worries about scaling their query IOPS, turn not to running a Hadoop cluster, but rather to using something like Google's BigTable.

[jeffbee]

Sounds like a best practice to me?