OK, there is no "they" and "they" wouldn't care if you knew anyway. After all, this isn't a blog about really important stuff like investing, acne cures, or cheap natural cleansing products.
But the secrets are real. Super cloud scaling consultant Kent Langley has put together a comprehensive checklist to consider when developing for the cloud:
ORM for Data Partitioning and Query Splitting - Split queries between updates and deletes from the start
Monitoring process, resources, and uptime - Process Monitoring, Resource Monitoring, UpTime Monitoring
Performance Testing and Capacity Planning - Can't make good decisions without doing some degree of Performance Testing and Capacity planning.
Static vs. Dynamic Content splitting / CDN - Reverse Proxy, Splitting Static and Dynamic content
Bundling and Compressing JS and CSS - Bundle them, compress, version, and then properly cache those bundles
Logging - Log appropriately and monitor those logs
Pragmatic Caching - Most current web applications will have between 3-5 layers of caching
Functional Decomposition - Decompose your entire application into functional silos
Deployment - It should be efficient, it should have a roll back capability, and it should be almost entirely automated to development
Asynchronous Practices - Most cases work can be queued and done by a separate process
Make sure your application processes are as lean as possible - More efficient code means less servers
Please follow the link to Kent's post for a full explanation. To some this may seem obvious, but that doesn't mean it gets done. Good helpful stuff.
