Ministry of Innovation / Business of Technology  What Second
Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps  Over the
past decade, building large-scale online applications has become
a pretty well-understood science with numerous books, papers,
periodicals, forums, and conferences devoted to the subject. The
Web overflows with advice and prescriptions for achieving high
reliability at massive scale.  Trouble is, implementing the best
scaling practices is not free, and is often overlooked early in
a product's lifecycle. Small teams use modern frameworks to
quickly develop useful applications, with little need to worry
about scale: today you can run a successful application on very
little infrastructure... at least, you can up to a point. Past
this point lies an uncomfortable middle ground, where small
teams face scaling challenges as their system becomes
successful, often without the benefit of an ideal design or lots
of resources to implement one. This article will lay out some
pragmatic advice for get