Definitely an interesting perspective from the media industry. Although the pattern described is a relatively common pattern across a lot of "webapps-at-scale."

Definitely an interesting perspective from the media industry. Although the pattern described is a relatively common pattern across a lot of "webapps-at-scale." For example, the CTO of Trip Advisor recently talked about how Trip Advisor is a series of distinct services exposing APIs that all run separately and are pulled together for a page render[1]. At some point most growing web apps simply outgrow the ability to be a single monolithic PHP/Rails/Python/whatever app and need start breaking things up. Although, it seems like TPM is seeing benefits from this that go outside the typical reasons folks start to go this route, like outgrowing a single relational database or wanting teams working on different components to be able to work and deploy independently of each other. [1]http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/6/27/tripadvisor-architecture-40m-visitors-200m-dynamic-page-view.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/6/27/tripadvisor-archit...