Does your envrionment look like the one at Instagram? I'd bet that you ha there are a few of you that have an applicaiton or two that contains as many servers, components, pieces and parts, all held together with the proverbial duct tape and baling twine. I think I've had a few environments that were close to this complicated, but in general I try to avoid this type of mish mosh of technologies tools and platforms.

When I look at the SQLServerCentral architecture, while much smaller, still scales nicely on a single database server (clustered) and a web server. If I needed more performance, I'd hope that I could do something more similar to the setup at StackOverflow, with better development and fewer parts of my architecture than adding the type of complexity that powers Instagram.

Read the rest of "Jacks of all trades" at SQLServerCentral.