Simon Willison’s Weblog

What’s the best way to learn how to scale web applications?

23rd February 2012

My answer to What’s the best way to learn how to scale web applications? on Quora

Read “Building Scalable Websites” by Cal Henderson. It’s a few years old now but still very relevant—it basically covers everything he learnt the hard way scaling Flickr. It’s a really fun read, too.

You might also find it useful to browse through the conference resources (slides,videos and notes) from talks on scaling that our community has collected on Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/topics/scaling... and if you try searching for “cal” you’ll find some of the talks he’s given on the subject.