Sify.com is one of the leading portals in India. Samachar.com is owned by the same company and is one of the top content aggregation sites in India, primarily targeting Non-resident Indians from around the world. Ramki Subramanian, an Architect at Sify, has been generous enough to describe the common back-end for both these sites. One of the most notable aspects of their architecture is that Sify does not use a traditional database. They query Solr and then retrieve records from a distributed file system. Over the years many people have argued for file systems over databases. Filesystems can work for key-value lookups, but they don't work for queries, using Solr is a good way around that problem. Another interesting aspect of their system is the use of Drools for intelligent cache invalidation. As we have more and more data duplicated in multiple specialized services, the problem of how to keep them synchronized is a difficult one. A rules engine is a clever approach.