TechCrunch is reporting that the new guys at Twitter have already decided to drop Ruby on Rails.

In the past week+ the whole business about Twitter scalability & reliability came to a head.

Yet, despite infrastructure that is visibly "hitting the wall", now it appears that the company is gaining interest in a funding round at a decent valuation (maybe even signed one, but more on that later).

How is this possible?

I think the answer to this is that

Yesterday we talked about whether Twitter really ever need to be reliable or not ... some said yes, others contend that it's not necessary.

It's been bugging me for awhile that something this popular ... and Twitter is so ... just keels over as often as it does.

A few outages ago I wondered aloud whether Twitter was taking the whole business of failure somewhat casually (triggered by some comments Blaine Cook made at SXSW).

Blaine replied with some great points, including

For the record, saying that the press surrounding the downtimes was a plus was a joke. Downtime is never good, and you should do everything you can to avoid it. However, it's a misrepresentation to say that you can build something successful without any downtime.

...

I'd like to propose a simple thought experiment. Consider this question:

What if computing is free?

While we're at it, assume that scale is always sufficient for the problem at hand, latency is acceptable, your applications always work, and that operations are cheap enough to be in the noise.

What's the Point?

The point of this is simple enough. One answer to this thought experiment was Google ... and that worked out pretty well.

In my earlier post I commented on my own little experiment about Web 2.0 infrastructure's ability to handle even modest-interest events.

Well my initial verdict was that most players had fallen flat on their face ... badly.

Now Techcrunch has a post detailing how badly Twitter really did ... and it was apparently abysmal. More detail by Mike Bogle (from the event) here.

I was experimenting around a bit with different ways to track the macworld keynote from my cozy office. I figured this would be good nano-metric on how far we've matured web 2.0 scaling techniques, particularly when focusing on delivering an event experience. This is a perfect example of a specialized community - bigger than some, smaller than many.

Sorry to say that every venue that was directly trying to cover the keynote has to get a mad kitty. I was hoping for better.

Irritated Kitties

Starting with a sort of "irritated kitty" were engadget and gizmodo ... both of their live posts timed out quite a bit at first, then settled down and responded ok, albeit slowly.

I often spend time with startups that are interested in building really successful, great big and hugely profitable companies. Thinking big thoughts from the beginning ...

One of the things that these guys see in the fabric is an opportunity to cleanly scale as they gain customers. Rather than living with the limitations of traditional architectures, these guys figure to start right from the beginning.

I Mean Full Service

Now I should point out when I say I work with guys like this, well I mean exactly that.

Nikita Ivanov talks about creating self-organizing swarm grids for the purposes of using the cycles in all of those Android phones that will probably be out there in the next couple of years. It's certainly doable - we already know how to do it - they're just more Linux devices, after all.

Sounds pretty cool at first blush, but what does it buy you?

Sam Charrington, colleague and friend, spent a few days at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit show last week. One of the more interesting things about Gartner shows are the analyst briefings. While there is no single place that can definitively define what's going on in markets as diverse as those in which we participate, these briefings are a good place to take a snapshot of what things look like today.