From 0 to 10M Requests/Day, Architecting a Boring...

TL;DR — You do not need Kafka, Kubernetes, or 17 microservices to handle serious traffic. A well-structured monolith, PostgreSQL, Redis, PgBouncer, a CDN, and horizontal application scaling can take you to 10 million requests per day with less risk, less cost, and far less operational pain. Most backend scaling guides start at the wrong point. They show you the architecture after a company has 200 engineers, multiple platform teams, and years of accumulated infrastructure. Then they present that