Beanstalk has nothing to do with the database, which is the point of contention. Spinning up more app servers only helps with serving signed in users.

You can configure beanstalk to scale your database out as well.

Scaling out database is nothing at all like spinning up stateless app servers.

Well there is no magical database solution where you can do that and I have to make decisions on what I can buy today not on what may be magically developed in the future.

In this respect, application partitioning with a deployable schema is not a bad solution for what I do.

AFAIK Reddit aren't using it. If anyone can clarify I'd love to hear more.