&gt; <i>I do not claim it is trivial.</i><p>By saying it can be done with $12,000 of hardware, you essentially claim it is trivial.<p>&gt; <i>everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.</i><p>Shardability, or partitionability, depends on the underlying distribution. It&#x27;s only &quot;perfectly&quot; partitionable if that distribution is perfectly uniform.<p>Twitter&#x27;s traffic patterns are power-laws. Some tags vastly outnumber others. Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.<p>&gt; <i>Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn&#x27;t (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable).</i><p>Twitter wasn&#x27;t interested in a contest to use the least hardware. They were in a race to keep up with surging load, while migrating from Rails to something that didn&#x27;t exist yet. Meanwhile they have, under the hood, built infrastructure that could not be bought off the shelf from anyone at the time.<p>We can&#x27;t actually come to a conclusion here, because you&#x27;re arguing a counterfactual. It&#x27;s always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself, because the visible features of a problem are obvious and the many, many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.<p>If you want to prove that Twitter doesn&#x27;t need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.