"Just get it working" is a valid startup strategy - until your product succeeds. Eventually, you will need to face the task of migrating from hastily thrown-together infrastructure to a proper platform, secure, scalable, cloud-native and demanding an actual answer to the question of "How do you deal with multi-tenancy?"
After helping a dozen companies - from startups to established enterprises - go from "a couple of VMs and a load balancer" to the next-generation platform the business needed, I identified the architecture patterns that make this journey dramatically easier. They will probably not surprise you: containers, PostgreSQL, event-driven architecture.
Let me walk you through the platform evolution paths that don't require full rewrites, what works best for each scenario, and when to adopt each pattern (spoiler: earlier than you think).

This talk is based fully on real-world observations and projects I personally worked on.