Drupal 7 is having a scalability makeover. Karoly Negyesi, Drupal Core Developer and Public Development Team Lead, explains the process in this video: Drupal 7 APIs, scalability mindset. Karoly states the general theme of the changes as: You give up some control and you get back scalability. An interesting comment on the politics of scalability?

Makeover may not be quite the right word though. A makeover implies a cosmetic change, looking better by changing the surface. Drupal's changes will go deeper than that, right to Drupal's core. It's a genuine and authentic change that will hopefully allow one of the Internet's most venerable Content Management Systems (CMSs) to compete with a constant stream of younger and sexier models.

Drupal is based on an older LAMP stack approach where PHP modules are scooped up and merged together each time a request is made to Drupal. Drupal's most intriguing idea is how it is built, expands, and changes by weaving together a single system out of individual components called modules. Built-in modules include comments, RSS, contact forms, forums, and Clean URLs. Add in modules include things like CSE to add Google's Custom Search Engine, modules to add in AdSense, CAPTCHA, and Sitemaps. Drupal establishes AOP extension points that allow modules to work remarkably well together, creating a site that feels like one single site even though it has been constructed from dozens of modules hunted and gathered from all over the digital world. 

The problem is the PHP code can directly access the database and directly render to the UI, there is little required layering. Part of Drupal's amazing configurability and extensibility has been how easy it is for everything to work together by changing the database. But when there's no layering it's almost impossible to optimize the system. If you have 20 different modules they each can make 20 separate calls to the database when what we really want is one call. And because of the direct SQL access when the number of writes increases there's no systematic way to distribute the writes across multiple servers. So we see as Drupal sites grow in the number of modules and the number of users both performance and scalability tank.

The younger models architect their systems differently. Sites like Google, Amazon, Facebook are written terms of an API and a framework, a service based approach. Using a service based approach the web tier can be programmed in terms of services that themselves are scalable so the entire system is scalable. When the API is skipped there are no leverage points that can be made to scale. It becomes a big ball of mud.

More layering and more APIs is exactly the direction Drupal is taking. Exactly how is Drupal changing?