It's really hard to convince people they don't have (and aren't likely to have) a Facebook-sized scale problem though, even if the vast majority of people really don't. It's like trying to convince people they don't have "big data". :-)
This bridges over to another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16156972) about the problem with many IT people thinking of their job as playing with cool technology rather than business outcomes. I’ve run into even a fair number of high-ranked people who habitually over-engineer things because they’ve tied their ego to the wrong metric, and many places didn’t have corrective pressure against that.
Hosted services have been good for counter-pressure: if your oracle cluster can be replaced with a $50/mo RDS instance, it’s a lot harder to hand-wave around the cost differential.
