By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering.

Cal's workshop on scalable web architectures offered expert tips and best practices for scaling LAMP applications.

Cal's lead developer at flickr and Yahoo! and he's also an excellent presenter. Topics covered included the differences between vertical and horizontal scaling, queueing, cacheing, storing and serving files, and much else, including closing material with realworld examples from flickr and livejournal.

The most interesting of our architecting challenges since about 2000 or 2001 at Jaduka's parent company, NetworkIP, have frequently concerned issues of data federation; as the number of our user accounts moved from the millions to the hundreds of millions we made many of the same discoveries Cal covered in "Scalabe Web Architectures", moving past the vertical strategy of a Really Big Server early on, and then hunting down logically disjunt tables that will never need to join, partitioning those out, and then managing the addition of new shards in the cluster. We've got a hybrid mix of MySQL and Informix databases in the network and we've benefitted tremendously from having Andrew Ford, our gifted Informix administrator, help guide the process for years now.

Cal's presentation was a definite stand-out, the massive room was packed with people and laptops scattered all over the floor, and there were more questions towards the end of his talk than there was time to answer. Cal's got a book on O'Reilly; look for the fish.

Pure content.