Exactly. I was responding mostly to the point that most CTO's/management belief that you should just let hardware handle it while programmers should just deliver fast as they can. He says it is always a balance; you cannot pay for optimized assembly when writing a crud application, but I claim we completely swung to the other side of the spectrum. For instance, a financial company I did work for had no database indices besides the primary key and left AWS to scale that for them. And then we are not even talking about Mongo (this was MySQL); Mongo is completely abused as it is famous for 'scaling' and 'no effort setup', so a lot of people don't think about performance or structure at all in any way; people just dump data in it and query it in diabolical ways. They just trust the software/hardware to fix that for them. I recently tried to migrate a large one to MySQL, but it is pure hell because of it's dynamic nature; complete structured changed over time while the data from all the past is still in there; fields appeared, changed content type etc and nothing is structured or documented. With 100s of gbs of that and not sure if things are actually correctly imported, I gave up. They are still paying through the nose; I fixed some indexing in their setup (I am by no means a Mongo expert but some things are universal when you think about data structures, performance and data management) which made some difference, but MySQL or Postgresql would've saved them a lot of money in my opinion. Ah well; at least the development of the system was cheap...