Parallel data stuff makes sense. As for the hardware aspects of scaling: I don't think that people are thinking about hardware much beyond "more boxes". My unde

Parallel data stuff makes sense. As for the hardware aspects of scaling: I don't think that people are thinking about hardware much beyond "more boxes". My understanding of the hype surrounding ec2 was that it mostly concerned the rich API/management options for configuring your scaling (in software). If you mean that people are ga-ga over how many of Amazon's machines they could scale to but not how they can add layers of caching and database partitioning -- that's probably accurate. IMHO the key point is that Amazon has a generic framework. The architecture you choose to scale with probably ends up being a lot more ad-hoc, "driven" by your problem domain. I'm fairly confident that if someone comes up with a rocket-ship approach to architecture that generalizes well for web startups, time and energy will be given over to thinking about it.