Let me flip it around. You said, "I wouldn't build a serious site on top of anything that didn't have some sort of built-in sharding story".

I think the opposite. Most serious sites will never need sharding.

My definition of seriousness includes some relatively large scale. Your definition of seriousness appears to mean any site that is important to the person or business running it. Is that a fair assessment?

I think your definition is better, and I should've said "a potentially-large site" or something like that.

Yes, this. Thanks for listening. It's a pet peeve of mine because most people work on serious sites, and a minority of them have large scale data, but people often imply that everyone needs to solve massive scaling problems even if they will never have them.

What do you mean by "serious"? That's broadly stated as well.

techcrunch is a serious site. They don't need sharding. They have thousands of posts, not millions, and certainly not billions or trillions.

You're joking, right ?

Every large site on the internet has talked about strategies around sharding. At some point you are surely going to hit the physical limitations of one database on one server.

He said "serious site". He did not say "large site". For example, techcrunch is most certainly a serious site. It is NOT large scale and in need of sharding.