System design Memes

The eternal gap between theoretical architecture and actual production traffic! 😂 When someone asks if your system can handle a million concurrent users, but your current load is just TEN people, what do you do? Tell the truth and look incompetent or confidently lie and pray you'll never have to prove it? This is basically every startup pitch deck vs. actual server metrics. "Oh yeah, our architecture is totally cloud-native, horizontally scalable to infinity!" Meanwhile, the poor Node.js server is running on a t2.micro instance that crashes when three people use the search function simultaneously. The best part? When the miracle happens and you actually get that traffic spike, you'll be frantically Googling "how to optimize database queries at 3am" while telling management "it's just a minor scaling issue!"