In a moment of lazy clicking, I clicked on this without looking at the URL, expecting to see the biggest webpage of all time, depicting Space, to scale.
This article drives at what may be the single biggest factor to consider when building a system to scale: sharding.<p>Nowadays, every time I think about an operation that the user will have to wait for, I consider if it "jumps the shard".<p>If so, it'll ultimately have to fire off a request to a separate server, and perhaps do an expensive join. It'll be slow. It had damn well better be worth it.
Scalability is important, but it seems the raw speed of websites to any particular user gets less attention than it needs. There is quite a bit of data that slow sites are much less attractive to users, even if they don't consciously realize it.<p>So if your response time is bad, you may not even need the scalability ;)<p>If you use bigtable, the speed is mostly determined by the number of sequential data accesses that you have. You should strive to have just 2 or less. The other advice in the article still applies.