[voxxit]

Why they have only two database servers running (with their database in memory, no less) with 200 million check-ins, is completely beyond me.

[seiji]

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.

[doty]

I honestly cannot tell whether or not that comment was serious.

[epochwolf]

Any comment with the words "web scale" should be considered a joke until proven otherwise. :)

[bl4k]

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

[look_lookatme]

I cracked up at this. Well played.

[mrkurt]

They actually said 4. Two shards with slaves for redundancy. It was apparently working fine until they lost track of what was going on. :)

[marclove]

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.