Sadly Joel Sprotsky the ex-Microsoftie still has a lot of work to do: choosing
Perhaps you should start by looking at how StackOverflow actually does it since a majority of their servers *aren't* Windows based. http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-architecture-update-now-at-95-million-page-vi.html
A good QA developer is just as necessary as a good developer. We all like writing original code, and it takes a special kind of person to write smoke tests, et al, for someone else's code. At my previous job, our product's QA department was just as important as our development department to get the monthly releases out on time.
Top flight developers producing quality code don't need large QA departments. They've already written well-designed, bug-resistent code, unit tests, integration tests, and performance tests, all in the course of producing something that works (the first time).
If you have to pay a phalanx of QA engineers to find bugs post-facto ("just as important as our development department"), you're doing it wrong. The bugs shouldn't have been there to begin with.
Speaking as a software engineer that works for a small software company, QA Engineers are essential. Not because we have sloppy developers who write poor code, but because software engineers can't predict every possible way someone will interact with out code.
QA Engineers have proved invaluable in finding those edge conditions we never coded for because it never occurred to us.
"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it." -- Alex Schure
