Though... I've also read at least one "interesting" postmortem with complex operating scenarios and thought to myself (partially joking) that their failure isn't what they thought it was. The failure was having an unnecessarily complicated architecture in the first place, with too many abstractions and too much bloat. ;-) I would have "just" written it in C++ on Debian... ;-) (I'm exaggerating)
(I know that "my way" is fantastic.. until you need to scale across people)