looks like you could have had a blue/green DB setup which would give you one less system to maintain and other benefits that a simple queue don't provide.
also, what do you do when the queue is down?
also, what do you do when the queue is down?
As for the database, yes, we could do blue/green I guess, but it's a big database and it's more cost effective to rely on the queue.
To be honest, I'm not even sure blue/green would be an option given our constraints.