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This is a guest post by Andy Gelfond, VP of Engineering for TripAdvisor. Andy has been with TripAdvisor for six and a half years, wrote a lot of code in the earlier days, and has been building and running a first class engineering and operations team that is responsible for the worlds largest travel site. There's an update for this article at An Epic TripAdvisor Update: Why Not Run On The Cloud? The Grand Experiment.
For TripAdvisor, scalability is woven into our organization on many levels - data center, software architecture, development/deployment/operations, and, most importantly, within the culture and organization. It is not enough to have a scalable data center, or a scalable software architecture. The process of designing, coding, testing, and deploying code also needs to be scalable. All of this starts with hiring and a culture and an organization that values and supports a distributed, fast, and effective development and operation of a complex and highly scalable consumer web site.
Stats as of 6/2011