While I consider myself a fairly well-informed IT architect, I often wonder incredulously at the how sites like Google, Amazon, YouTube, MySpace and Microsoft keep up with demand. While a lot of the information is proprietary (and understandably so), some details are available online.
I recently ran across HighScalability, a site dedicated to covering the behind-the-scenes details of scalable installations. Interesting, the site mentions that it would like to “help you build successful scalable web sites.” It sounds like a noble goal, but there are very few sites in the world that could truly benefit from these levels of performance. And, those that can usually have unique considerations. Amazon’s architecture is probably not very useful to YouTube (though parts of it are probably relevant).
Microsoft TechNet also includes numerous scalability and performance-related studies. While some reek of unbridled marketing (showing happy, attractive people in pristine data centers), some studies are really interesting. I especially like the section entitled How Microsoft Does IT (n.b., “IT” refers to information technology).
Overall, there’s a lot to be learned from how others do things. In some cases, you can even find out what doesn’t work well. Anyway, scalability studies can be an interesting way to find out more about cutting edge technology. Certainly, we’ve come a long way since dynamic DNS and static content caching! Now if only my blog were to require those levels of performance (do your part, and reload this page!).
