http://justinsb.posterous.com/aws-down-why-the-sky-is-falling A blog post explaining nature of the current Amazon AWS outage. The deal is that several so-called availability zones (AZ) failed simultaneously in amazon US-EAST region, even though amazon’s FAQ describe such event to be unlikely. Many interesting comments – read them!
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/real-world-web-application-benchmarking/203367363919 Facebook has build custom web-app testing framework to test server performance. Read it, especially the section on why “standard” SPECxxx benchmarks are not a good measure of anything. Also, ready about performance-per-watt, as this is really important for modern data centers.
http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Understanding_the_StackOverflow_Database_Schema Notes about schema used by StackOverflow.com and related websites. It is very simple, only several tables used. (most likely because there are performance problems with joins)
http://www.kriha.de/krihaorg/dload/ultra.pdf a draft of the book “Scalability and Availability Aspects” by Walter Kriha. Many up-to-date info on theory and practice of building scalable high-loaded web/internet systems
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/RandomStuff/copilot_spec.pdf Example specs from Joel / copilot /
http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/cio_update.html?cm_mmc=PXBL%7C0700_B6-_-downtime-20101229 detailed notes about skype outage on DEC-23/24 2010
http://www.insight-it.ru/masshtabiruemost/arkhitektura-vkontakte/ [ENG] http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.insight-it.ru%2Fmasshtabiruemost%2Farkhitektura-vkontakte%2F&sl;=ru&tl;=en&hl;=&ie;=UTF-8 some info about internals of vkontakte.ru - russian facebook clone, most popular social network in Russia, #34 in top100 websites according to alexa (btw, Flickr.com is #35).
http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2010/11/mysql-vs-postgresql-part-1-table.html An article from a well-known PostgreSQL developer comparing MySQL InnoDB and PostgreSQL table structures
http://dga.livejournal.com/44132.html a lot of interesting details about using flash drives as cache and high-perf block io devices (notes from google talk given at UCSD)
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/04/14/#20100414-anatomy_of_gsm_cellphone An excellent [attempt of ] description of the GSM cell phones hardware, design, architecture and implementation