High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2. It has been recently open sourced on Google Code.

Scalr allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI's for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
Scalr promises automatic high-availability and scaling for developers by health and load monitoring.

The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it.

GigaSpaces launched OpenSpaces.org, a community web site for developers who wish to utilize and contribute to the open source OpenSpaces development framework.

OpenSpaces extends the Spring Framework for enterprise Java development, and leverages the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) for data caching, messaging and as the container for application business logic. It is designed for building highly-available, scale-out applications in distributed environments, such as SOA, cloud computing, grids and commodity servers. OpenSpaces is widely used in a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and retail -- and across the web in e-commerce, Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites, search and more.

This presentation by Michael Radwin describes why Yahoo! had standardized on PHP going forward. It describes how after reviewing all the web technologies including their own internal ones, PHP was choosen. It shows that not only technical reasons , but also business and development processes were taken into account.