If you need scale, then you know what you need when you need it. None of this advice people are tossing around would apply to WhatsApp, for instance. Because they needed to get into the weeds on BEAM optimizations for Erlang and they needed to do so quickly. They probably didn't have a year to mess around getting K8S up and stable. Or crafting the perfect Ansible script. Or infrastructure-as-code. They probably cared very little about any of that.
WhatsApp is the closest thing you'll see for explosive growth. And they had time to work on BEAM patches. Think about that. Their whole world didn't just collapse because they couldn't support a billion connections on day one. Even they had time to scale as they needed.
If you need scale, then you know what you need when you need it. None of this advice people are tossing around would apply to WhatsApp, for instance. Because they needed to get into the weeds on BEAM optimizations for Erlang and they needed to do so quickly. They probably didn't have a year to mess around getting K8S up and stable. Or crafting the perfect Ansible script. Or infrastructure-as-code. They probably cared very little about any of that.
WhatsApp is the closest thing you'll see for explosive growth. And they had time to work on BEAM patches. Think about that. Their whole world didn't just collapse because they couldn't support a billion connections on day one. Even they had time to scale as they needed.