Good articles describing the infastructure of large commercial sites like Amazon.com?

Question

Can anyone point me to a good primer on how a large scale commercial website like amazon.com is set up? Most importantly, I'd like to know about how the databases are set up. Do they have a distributed set of databases to balance the load, that all sends updates to one 'master' database, etc.? Doesn't have to be the inside dope(although that's preferable), just a plausible account of how smart people would run an amazon.com.

Answer 1

The guys at software engineering radio have done an interview podcast with Werner Vogels, who is the CTO of amazon.com.

Quite interresting and a lot of detail.

Answer 2

This may be useful to you..

http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture

Besides this website contains architectural information about other high volume websites.

Also have a look at this video The Amazon.com Technology Platform: Building Blocks for Innovation.

Answer 3

Take a look at these two also:

1. Dan Pritchett on Architecture at eBay
2. Randy Shoup Discusses the eBay Architecture