High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

In the Amazon Services architecture article the podcast mentions Mashery. I went to their site at http://www.mashery.com/, but I can't quite figure out what it is. They want to:

Unleash and manage channels for your API responsibly with Mashery’s combination of security, usage, access management, tracking, metrics, commerce, performance optimization and developer community tools.

An example would help, because I am not getting it.

A lot of sites hosted in San Francisco are down because of at least 6 back-to-back power outages power outages. More details at laughingsquid.

Sites like SecondLife, Craigstlist, Technorati, Yelp and all Six Apart properties, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox are all down. The cause was an underground explosion in a transformer vault under a manhole at 560 Mission Street. Flames shot 6 feet out from the manhole cover. Over PG&E 30,000 customers are without power.