Built for a scale that never came

The second most expensive mistake I see is infrastructure built for a scale that never came A startup spends three months building a multi-region, highly available, auto-scaling architecture. Kafka for event streaming. Separate read replicas for every database. Cross-region failover. The works They have 200 users Not 200,000. 200 The infrastructure can handle 50,000 concurrent users without breaking a sweat. 200 users use about 4 percent of its capacity. The other 96 percent runs continuously, full price, waiting for traffic that may or may not ever arrive This is a real thing I've seen. Not once The motivation is always good. Engineers want to build things right. They've read about the companies that got caught unprepared when they went viral. They don't want to be the team that had to rewrite everything under load. They build for the future to avoid the pain of not being ready The problem is that the future is uncertain and the infrastructure bill is not Every month you run