InfoQ has a great article up from Randy Shoup, a senior architect at eBay. He discusses the philosophies and practices employed by eBay to ensure their software scales to the demands of the site. I like articles like this because the techniques used by large systems (eBay, Google, Amazon, etc) tend to also apply to smaller systems. These larger systems help flush out the problems that a smaller system may not run into until it is too late.

From the article:

At eBay, one of the primary architectural forces we contend with every day is scalability. It colors and drives every architectural and design decision we make. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, over two billion page views a day, and petabytes of data in our systems, this is not a choice - it is a necessity.

Click HERE to watch the video presentation and corresponding slides.