Early-stage teams often choose infrastructure based on what's fastest to set up, which is the right instinct at launch. The problem shows up later, when traffic grows and the fastest setup becomes the most expensive and hardest to change.
Our approach is to architect for the size you'll be in twelve months, while only building for the size you are today. That means picking managed services and cloud providers that won't need to be replaced as you scale, even if you're not using their full capability yet.
Concretely, this shows up in a few decisions: keeping infrastructure defined as code from day one so environments are reproducible, separating stateful services (databases, storage) from stateless application code so either can scale independently, and setting up monitoring before you need it rather than after an outage forces the issue.
None of this requires over-engineering a five-person startup's infrastructure like it's a large enterprise. It requires making a small number of decisions early that keep your options open later — which is exactly the kind of trade-off our DevOps and cloud work is built around.