Thoughts, techniques, and references to achieving scalability

I'm going to use this label, scalability, to collect my thoughts and random ideas for how to make systems scale.

I'm going to start with a list of links that I recognize have been formative to my understanding of scalability.

SEDA: An Architecture for Highly Concurrent Server Applications and then C10K

• Reading the SEDA thesis and then the C10K site helped me understand that simple imperative programming might not always scale...
  

REST: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures

• REST identifies scalability as a key property for internet information architectures. The Stateless Client-Server, Cache, and Layered System constraints all contribute to the scalability of systems.
  

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions

• Most recently this paper by Pat Helland influenced my thinking: Transactions can only bound a single entity, but that entity can contain various pieces of data including historical communication entries to help support idempotent messaging.