A lengthy discussion with Alan Williamson on the "perfect technology stack".   In today's environment do you HAVE to be running on Linux, or is Windows Server just fine for some shops?   C# or Java?  Java or Ruby on Rails?  Should you be getting rid of all of your old perl and PHP code?  Is this the end for relational databases?  AngularJS or jQuery?

Alan and Jim talk about the ins and outs of making applications run faster and scale to handle lots of users.  We compare the two choices for scaling applications: Vertical scaling (adding more resources to existing machines), versus Horizontal scaling (spreading the load across multiple machines).  We also discuss Amazon's AWS and EC2 platforms versus Microsoft Azure.