I'm creating my own scalable, rapid prototyping web server. How should I design it?

Question

I'm going to create my own web server that focuses on scalability, rapid prototyping and the use of JavaScript as the server's scripting language, much like node.js. It will use a Model-View-Controller design pattern so a web application can support more concurrent users just by adding hardware -- and not having to redesign the software. Basically, I'm aiming to produce a framework that allows for fast and easy development of cloud applications without the need to write lots of boiler plate code. I've got some questions about this...

1. How hard will it be to put MySQL in the cloud? How could I go about implementing this and make the resulting product free? Will I have to write my own engine or modify an existing one, if I do what should I watch out for?
2. To make this scalable I need to adjust from one server to hundreds of servers this creates the requirement for the servers to be load balancing, how should I do this? If I balance based on the work load per server I would need gateway to handle all the incoming requests. Is it the right idea to have all the servers check into the gateway and update there status.
3. By having the servers run through a gateway if the gateway dies all the incoming requests are ignored. I'm thinking that having all the servers maintain a list of each other, or at least a few I could rebuild the list of servers and establish a new gateway. Is it worth it? Or should I have a backup gateway that could switch out? Should I let the user choose?
4. How should I pick which server handles the database and which handles the page serving? Should I spread the database so that queries are preformed on multiple servers? Which would theoretically improve performance.
5. The servers would need to mirror the database at least once so that if a server goes down the database isn't corrupted. So this brings up writing another question, should I broadcast SQL queries so that all the servers can take a bit of the work load? If I do it that way wouldn't a query clog up the network so that other queries couldn't be preformed? What are my alternatives?
6. Finally, is there a free solution already out there that might need a little modification that suits my needs?