Lots of cool stuff happening this week...

1. Voldemort gets rebalancing. It's one thing to shard data to scale, it's a completely different level of functionality to manage those shards intelligently. Voldemort has stepped up by adding advanced rebalancing functionality: Dynamic addition of new nodes to the cluster; Deletion of nodes from cluster; Load balancing of data inside a cluster.
2. Microsoft Finally Opens Azure for Business. Out of the blue Microsoft opens up their platform as a service service. Good to have more competition and we'll keep an eye out for experience reports.
3. New details on LinkedIn architecture by Greg Linden. LinkedIn appears to only use caching minimally, preferring to spend their efforts and machine resources on making sure they can recompute computations quickly than on hiding poor performance behind caching layers.
4. The end of SQL and relational databases?  by David Intersimone. For new projects, I believe, we have genuine non-relational alternatives on the table (pun intended).
5. HipHop for PHP: Move Fast. When you make millions of widgets saving pennies per widget quickly adds up to real money. Facebook released HipHop, a PHP compiler, aimed at shaving off cycle of CPU and bytes of memory in production of their social widgets.