It's actually sad to see that scale-up almost disappeared, especially considering the insanelly powerful HW we have now, just NVMe SSDs are game changer for anything I/O bound. I remember how few years back there were some people in our company completely floored when they learned that StackOverflow ran on 1 SQL server (quite beefy though, 1TB RAM IIRC). Similar 'cloud' (aka 'someone else's datacenter') setup would cost significantly more, but that seems to be forgotten/forbidden knowledge these days. I guess people need to justify those cloud technologies certificates.