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My experience is that scaling up can lead to owning pets instead of cattle. It's never fun having a 1TB ATS instance that's acting funky but you're terrified of bouncing it. That's more a devil's advocate anecdote than an argument against scaling up.

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I think you can (and clearly should) be ready for your big boxes to go down. And it is much more painful to bounce a large box than a small box. But that doesn't mean having say 4x [1] big boxes is strictly worse than having a whole bunch of smaller boxes.

[1] one pair in two locations, basically the minimum amount, unless you're really latency insensitive so you could have one in three locations.

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