It's unfortunately common that people just throw more resources at a problem instead of looking at the most egregious bottlenecks.<p>Putting everything in the cloud has made the idea of scaling (without much regard for cost) the answer for addressing performance-related symptoms instead of fixing the actual problems. It's important to know that scaling can't fix certain problems, and that you should try to address those problems before you run out of scaling, rather than waiting until you're at the biggest instance you can buy and are scrambling to figure out what to do.