The ability to turn a website into a large web service is a skill that’s deeply important amongst web application developers, but yet I’ve found it to be somewhat lacking. How is it that this fundamental skill is so often overlooked? Part of it has to do with the fact that many developers work on [...]

Before we actually get started hacking on our code, let’s make sure we’ve got the right questions asked and answered. We’re going to need some resources, the help of others in our organization, and probably some understanding of the current system structure before we’re successful in our goal.

Now that we know we want to scale our application, we first need to make sure it’s running at peak performance. There are a number of things that we can and must do in order to ensure that the newly scaled application uses resources appropriately, runs efficiently, and, most importantly, does not require excessive resources [...]

Now that your application is running at peak performance and you’ve decided that it’s time to scale, let’s talk about the right setup. The modern age has brought us lots of new ways to take a growing site and scale it. From Amazon Web Services to cloud computing and grid computing, to Mosso and Akamai, [...]