If you've forgotten about NoSQL or BigData, chances are your shop really just overshot how much data and traffic they have.
Easily handle production load on 3-5 servers / VMs while reading all about how to script quickly spinning up 1,000 VMs if they really needed to.
http://akorotkov.github.io/blog/2016/05/09/scalability-towar...
That's not average hardware. It's a couple hundred connections max running select statements as fast as possible on the best hardware they could afford to test against.
That doesn't translate into your CRUD app handling a million requests per second.