Listening to Werner Vogel (Amazon) and Dan Pritchett (EBay) talk about their architecture and design for scalability at QCon was a real eye-opener. I doubt I will need any level of scalability close to theirs in the systems I usually work on, but it is an interesting topic. One of my main concerns when developing applications is that not a lot of developers really can relate to transactions. Many are just used to making one call to the database with lots of SQL, not even grouping several of them into one transaction. Understanding transactions and having them makes life in J2EE land a lot easier, but they are also the main obstacle when it comes to scalability. I am not sure where the line is drawn for when it becomes impossible, but I guess you are talking a fair bit of nodes. If you end up in that situation managebility has an article on Design Patterns for Infinite Scalability. Again, a lot of interesting stuff, check it out.
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