&gt;  Realistically, with intelligent caching (even something as simple as Nginx caching), you can easily support several thousand users just fine with a t2 style instance<p>agreed, the article approach to scalability is to throw silly amounts of money at the problem, instead of going for an architecture to squeeze first every bit of performance out of the app. true this approach is pretty simple and works for any kind of application, but the RDS will hit connections cap quite fast if on just throws instances at the problem.<p>edit: yep, just noticed this comes from a Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect, of course the solution is to throw money at them