Comment by arwhatever

Recent team I was on used one big server.

Wound up spawning off a separate thread from our would-be stateless web api to run recurring bulk processing jobs.

Then coupled our web api to the global singleton-esque bulk processing jobs thread in a stateful manner.

The wrapped actors up on actors on top of everything to try to wring as much performance as possible out of the big server.

Then decided they wanted to have a failover/backup server but it was too difficult due to the coupling to the global singleton-esque bulk processing job.

[I resigned at this point.]

So yeah color me skeptical. I know every project's needs are different, but I'm a huge fan of dumping my code into some cloud host that auto-scaled horizontally, and then getting back to writing more code that provides some freeeking busines value.