"Modern Wonders of the World"

This time of the year, you become even more aware of the scale of operations amazon, eBay and Google support 24x7 for a global audience. Sadagopan does a nice job summarizing the architectural elements behind these marvels of modern computing and commerce.

To me, it is impressive how these companies have mostly custom built their computing platforms. In a world where we hear so much bragging from packaged software vendors and systems integrators about what they can do/build for customers, it is good to see outstanding examples of what companies can build/integrate for themsleves.