[1oooqooq]

looks like you could have had a blue/green DB setup which would give you one less system to maintain and other benefits that a simple queue don't provide.

also, what do you do when the queue is down?

[aspyct]

I don't think the queue has ever been down in 6 years. It certainly never was a breaking point.

As for the database, yes, we could do blue/green I guess, but it's a big database and it's more cost effective to rely on the queue.

To be honest, I'm not even sure blue/green would be an option given our constraints.