Vertical Scaling
This is a guest repost by Sriram Devadas, Engineer at Vistaprint, Web platform group. A fun and well written analogy of how to scale web applications using a familiar coffee shop as an example. No coffee was harmed during the making of this post. I own a small coffee shop.
Strategy
All the cool kids advocate scaling out as the secret sauce of scaling. And it is, but don't forget to serve some tasty "scaling up" as a side dish. Scaling up doesn't have to mean buying a jet propelled, liquid cooled, 128 core monster
MySQL
MySQL Scale-Out by application partitioning by Oli Sennhauser Eventually every database system hit its limits. Especially on the Internet, where you have millions of users which theoretically access your database simultaneously, eventually your IO system will be a bottleneck. [A] promising but more complex solution with nearly no scale-out limits