[coldcode]

I find it interesting that these sorts of stacks have tons of moving parts. Maybe it's the nature of highly scalable systems? Or does it come from starting with one particular technology and then having to drag in lots of other things to make it work?

[dmitrymukhin]

In the article we tried to convey the main idea behind that — take the best tool for the job at hand. There's no "one size fits all" framework or product to put you money on. It's much easier to handle this zoo than making something do that it's not supposed to.

Furthermore, to get high scalability, you have to make things as loosely coupled as possible. This means you're up to making some choices.

Hope that makes sense and answers the question :)

[otakucode]

It wouldn't need many moving parts if you didn't want to mess with the data. Like if you just functioned essentially as a blob store. But as soon as you start touching data formats... things get fun and you should prepare to be a hacker playground.