- High Scalability

Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion by Pat Helland. In particular, we focus on the implications that fall out of assuming we cannot have large-scale distributed transactions.
Tragedy of the Commons, and Cold Starts - Cold application starts on Google App Engine kill your application's responsiveness.
Intel’s 1M IOPS desktop SSD setup by Kevin Burton. What do you get when you take 7 Intel SSDs and throw them in a desktop? 1M IOPS
Videos from NoSQL Berlin sessions. Nicely done talks on CAP, MongoDB, Redis, 4th generation object databases, CouchDB, and Riak.
Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems by Jeff Dean of Google describing how they do their thing. Here are some glosses on the talk by Greg Linden and James Hamilton. You really can't do better than Greg and James.
- Advice from Google on Large Distributed Systems by Greg Linden. A nice summary of Jeff Dean's talk. A standard Google server appears to have about 16G RAM and 2T of disk; Things will crash. Deal with it!; When designing for scale, you should design for expected load, ensure it still works at x10, but don't worry about scaling to x100.
- Jeff Dean: Design Lessons and Advice from Building Large Scale Distributed Systems by James Hamilton. A data center wide storage hierarchy; Failure Inevitable; Excellent set of distributed systems rules of thumb; Typical first year for a new cluster; GFS Usage at Google; Working on next generation Big Table system called Spanner.