This session presents a practical journey from serving the first 100 users to engineering an AWS architecture capable of handling up to one million requests per second. We will explore how bottlenecks emerge across application servers, databases, APIs, caching, background jobs, and deployments and how patterns such as horizontal scaling, load balancing, distributed caching, asynchronous processing, database scaling, autoscaling, observability, and graceful degradation address them.

More importantly, this is not a “use microservices for everything” talk. It focuses on when architectural changes become necessary, which metrics should drive those decisions, and the reliability and cost trade-offs involved