What I emphasized in this article (author here) is scaling postgres backups. This works because there's already rock-solid systems built into postgres + surrounding tooling to build from.

The broader takeaway is the principle of, "how do I take something that doesn't scale on its own and make it so?" This applies to backups, compute, storage layers, proxies. It's why Neki and Vitess are so powerful for everything from small 1GB databases to petabytes.

Hanging around to answer questions, too :)