We were running DC/OS back then. They're probably on K8S now 😩 But the thumbnail cluster ran on its own.

The massive thumbnail cluster was pretty necessary. We were storing all the different buyable sizes in a cache cluster that took up a crazy amount of space (I want to say like 100s of TB). During a busy day we'd sell a few thousand news and sports photos a minute. Being able to rip them fast in real time was pretty important and massive freed up space on the storage arrays.