Yup, everyone thought they had “big data” for a moment in the industry, and it turns out, they all just read the same trendy blog posts. I made the mistake of “clustering” at my previous company, and it introduced so much unnecessary complexity. If you are really worried about future proofing, just design a schema where the main entities are denormalized and use UUID for your primary keys. If you need to shard later, it will be much easier. Although, again, it’s likely that you will never need to.