It's a different kind of complexity. Essentially, your app layer needs shift from:
- transaction serializability
- atomicity
- deadlocks (generally locks)
- occ (unless you do VERY long tx, like a user checkout flow)
- retries
- scale, infrastructure, parameter tuning
towards thinking about - separating data into shards
- sharding keys
- cross-shard transactions
which can be sometimes easier, sometimes harder. I think there are a surprising amount of problems where it's much easier to think about sharding than about race conditions!> But with B2B, we have accounts ranging from 100 users per organization to 200k users per organization.
You'd be surprised at how much traffic a single core (or machine) can handle — 200k users is absolutely within reach. At some point you'll need even more granular sharding (eg. per user within organization), but at that point, you would need sharding anyways (no matter your DB).