This is not your father's HighScalability:

• 13,000 times the world’s GDP: Cost of the Death Star
• Quotable quotes:
  • @chrissalzman: Scalability is the enemy of right now.
  • @resatsch: I like our IT team: "We used Redis before Youporn did it"
  • @virtual_bill: Mixing flash and spinning disk to balance cost is like strapping a rocket to a turtle.
  • @jaksprats: HDDs got slower at random access as they got bigger, cuz disk seeks stayed almost the same, similar phenomenon w/ Flash
• Priam, king of Troy, begat a daughter, Cassandra, and Netflix, king of true distributed Amazon infrastructure, begat a co-processor for Cassandra, Priam, used for Backup and recovery, Bootstrapping, Centralized configuration management, and RESTful monitoring and metrics. This is why Troy was never actually destroyed, it was simply backedup in-situ to another region.
• Evernote is everfaithful to SQL because SQL gives it all the ACID it needs to keep its billion Notes and almost 2 billion Resource files in order. But is keeping an attribute map to facilitate painless schema upgrades and partitioning users really being faithful to SQL?
• With Amazon's Simple Workflow service Amazon is moving up stack, leaving traditional IaaS behind, and heading directly into enterprise PaaS territory. It's an interesting choice. Workflow systems are a highly researched area that tend to not do well in practice because real life state machines and dependencies quickly outstrip the expressiveness and capabilities of the underlying workflow engine. Typically using a queuing system, application logic, and publish-subscribe event notification, will get you where you need to go. But enterprises need workflow and approval processes and that requirement may be one of the tethers being cut with a workflow service. We'll see if users are willing to put that much of their application structure into lock down.