[manigandham]

Specific question: What kind of load needs scaling within seconds? If it's so sensitive why not have extra capacity available?

[mistermann]

I also wondered that. I think a lot of technical people are irresistibly drawn to solving scale & performance problems by resorting to ever more complex rube goldberg machines & processes rather than just throw a few measly grand of hardware at it and be done.

Stackoverflow is one example of scale with a pretty boring architecture.