The Economics of the Cloud: Dissecting a Must-Read White Paper by Bernard Golden. I love the depiction of the unseen and unfelt forces that nevertheless organize everything around them: After a brief introduction, the authors lay out a central thesis: despite initial concerns about shortcomings in new technology offerings, "historically, underlying economics have a much stronger impact on the direction and speed of disruptions, as technological challenges are resolved or overcome through the rapid innovation we've grown accustomed to.
Hypertable Use Case: Tribalytic. One of the primary reasons we chose a scalable NoSQL database was so that the system would be architected to scale up as we grow. We can add more countries, increase sample sizes, and sustain more traffic without “hitting the wall”.
ACID in Theory and Practice by Dan Weinreb. When you dig deep relational databases aren't that much more ACID compliant than NoSQL databases. Everyone compromises for speed.
Scalability as a Discipline by AFK Partners. While understanding the rules, patterns, and principles of scalability are completely achievable by anyone in the technology organization, this does not mean that they are widely known.