On scalability

Twitter certainly had such an easy win when, while at a fraction of the scale the service now operates at, one of their engineers rewrote their in-house Ruby-based message queue in Scala. That was great, but it was scaling in the small. Twitter is still fighting an uphill battle to scale in the large, because doing so is about much, much more than which technology you choose.

So says Alex Payne in his post Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large (emphasis mine).

That’s not a knock on Twitter, per se. Alex’ larger point is that scaling is not just about hardware OR software. Instead it’s a complicated mix of the two, with a lot of testing, and at least as much magic thrown in.

[Via Saidimu]