They are dealing with web scale sharded NoSQL realtime geo scala. Old rules don't apply when 80% of the words describing your company didn't exist two years ago.
I honestly cannot tell whether or not that comment was serious.
Any comment with the words "web scale" should be considered a joke until proven otherwise. :)
I cracked up at this. Well played.
Just as I was thinking that this thread was getting worse the further I scroll down I come across the best summation of this story
They actually said 4. Two shards with slaves for redundancy. It was apparently working fine until they lost track of what was going on. :)
Yea but like you said, since half of them are just for redundancy, they were in effect only running 2 database servers. I must say I find it stunning that a service with that much traffic, especially one with an infrastructure that requires the entire database to be in-memory, would be operating with just 2 database servers running on EC2.
I know hindsight is 20/20, but I can't imagine the foresight was any worse than 20/30.