High Scalability: “Tumblr started as a fairly typical large LAMP application. The direction they are moving in now is towards a distributed services model built around Scala, HBase, Redis, Kafka, Finagle, and an intriguing cell based architecture for powering their Dashboard. Effort is now going into fixing short term problems in their PHP application, pulling things out, and doing it right using services.”
Even the companies you believe are doing it right, start by doing it wrong, and evolve. Twitter, Facebook, and now Tumblr. Webscale is not easy to achieve. Running node.js with a MySQL database isn’t going to cut it. It takes serious planning and thought, and a great operations team to keep the beast running. I know this by experience. I made those same mistakes and learned a lot in the process.
I love this stuff.