A good overview of Flickr’s setup. Nearly all of the techniques used by Flickr can be applied directly to Amazon’s cloud EC2/S3 services with faster scaling, at a lower initial cost.

Some slides on Flickr’s architecture. It’s all sensible stuff, with very little magic: Php4, Mysql (innodb), ImageMagick, Perl, Java (for nodes), RHEL, and so on.

Ryan Tomayko explains REST architecture principles to his wife, easily one of the most accessible descriptions around. While the moniker REST annoys me (it’s so uninspiring), it’s a terribly cool set of patterns.

The Xbox 360 CPU architecture.

Tags and Tagging
“This is something the ‘well-designed metadata’ crowd has never understood — just because it’s better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.”

IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to “grow up”
Nope. We call bullshit. After wasting years of our lives trying to implement physical three tier architectures that “scale” and failing miserably time after time, we’re going with something that actually works.

Design by Wiki
Still, using a wiki for high-level architectural docs and then drilling down to a lower-level system design seems, to me at least, to be somewhat of a dark horse in the software development world. There is some evidence to show that projects, both in the open source and commercial worlds, use wikis to aid their development efforts, but either I’m exposing a severe lack of l337 g00gl3 sk1lz or there is very little in the way of formal literature regarding the use of wikis for enterprise architecture and/or technical design.

Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.