> maybe the problems I've been working on aren't as hard as they seem. Most likely this. When you have a horizontally sharded MySQL database that spans multipl

> maybe the problems I've been working on aren't as hard as they seem. Most likely this. When you have a horizontally sharded MySQL database that spans multiple datacenters - managing replication, failover and scaling out is not something you would expect most developers to be able to handle. Let alone fine-tuning various kernel parameters, in depth monitoring and other performance tunings. EDIT: Sure most experienced developers would have a high level and abstract idea about various things that may be outta whack - but it takes some one with expertise in the field to go beyond guesses.