PUBLIC MARKS from holyver with tags performance & architecture

The folks at Evernote were kind enough to write up an overview of their architecture in a post titled Architectural Digest. Dave Engberg describes their approach to networking, sharding, user storage, search, and some other custom services.

This post isn't meant to be an end all to Drupal and CDNs, but rather just some insight into the way I have tackled this issue for the time being. There are a number of options to choose from and a lot of different ways to go about it. You could get a new server locally and load balance your stuff, you could get a new server locally and use it as a static file server, you could team up with a big time CDN like Akamai or Limelight and go that route, or you could go the less expensive CDN route with something like Amazon S3.

in this article, i outline a step-by-step process for incrementally scaling your deployment, from a simple single-node drupal install running all components of the system, all the way to a load balanced, multi node system with database level optimization and clustering. since you almost certainly don't want to jump straight from your single node system to the mother of all redundant clustered systems in one step, i've broken this down into 5 incremental steps, each one building on the last. each step along the way is a perfectly viable deployment.