At least half of the gains can probably achieved by just rolling a distributed redis setup and not distributing the PostgreSQL database. This should cover most non-personalized read operations which on this type of site should be most of them. It also seems like the database distribution is an attempt to solve a problem of his own making. He states that each blog posts page view needs 30 database queries in the background. This to me suggests an inefficient data structure or complexity for complexity’s sake. Heck, he could probably even achieve 80% of what he’s trying to do by delivering selected slow but static queries from edge computing KV stores without having any further distributed backend or database servers. But ofc this whole project is a sales pitch and he would get the attention he’s receiving with a simple Django+Postgres+Redis setup in a single region with just basic CI/CD.