[hobos_delight]

Scaling _if_ needed has been the death knell of many companies. Every engineer wants to assume that they will need to scale to millions of QPS, most of the time this is incorrect, and when it is not then the requirement have changed and it needs to be rebuilt anyway.

[MrBuddyCasino]

This is true for startups an small companies, Big Corps IT is so far away from operating efficiently that this doesn't really matter.

[hobos_delight]

I think it completely matters - yes these orgs are a lot more wasteful, but there is still an opportunity to save money here, especially is this economy, if not for the internal politics wins.

I’ve spent time in some of the largest distributed computing deployments and cost was always a constant factor we had to account for. The easiest promos were always “I saved X hundred million” because it was hard to argue against saving money. And these happened way more than you would guess.