Most teams nail auto-scaling within their existing infrastructure - Karpenter handles that beautifully. Where they struggle is provisioning new infrastructure: new clusters, new regions, new environments. These operations are still treated as complex, manual projects.
But here's what's equally important: I spot the architectural anti-patterns that will kill your system at scale, before they kill your system.
I've seen teams use Kafka incorrectly and watch their systems collapse when disk usage peaks. I've seen relational databases used as queues, caches used as primary storage, and "scalable" microservices architectures that created more problems than they solved. These aren't just performance issues - they're reliability time bombs.