> Built with scalability up front rather than an afterthought
And
> Pedestal gives developers a solid foundation to build highly scalable backend services [emphasis mine]
Pedastal seems more like a framework for building enterprise services, not simply "web applications". It's serving a type of use case, for sure. Just not one suited for all web applications.
If you're a pre-product-market-fit startup, trying to validate a concept, pedastal isn't for you. But, if you're square, or linkedin, or [insert successful startup here] and you're going to introduce a new service into your existing infrastructure, yea, it should be performant, and then maybe pedastal and the mental model that backs it makes sense.
But for an early stage startup, you're not likely to have to solve many of these problems, especially the scaling ones. And doing SOA from the get-go is orders of magnitude more complex than the standard monolithic application. You won't reap any of the benefits from SOA until you have the requirement for some form of scale -- either team scale or product performance scale. The more likely case for an early-stage startup taking the approach pedastal is "peddling" (forgive me, I had to) is that your application architecture will be significantly more complex, making it harder to work on, grow, and hire for.
The stuff pedastal is trying to do is for grown-ups, and grown up applications. And in this metaphor, early-stage startups are teenagers.
How this looks to me is that relevance has a specific perspective on how to build services. I'd guess that perspective is highly informed on the types of clients they work with. Given the mental model of pedastal, I'd also venture to guess that they don't do much work with early-stage startups. Excuse my presumptiveness on the nature of Relevance's business, but if a consulting shop tried to sell this bill of goods to my early-stage company, I'd probably sound the architecture astronaut alarm and show them the door.