Werner hints that Amazon guarantees performance and availability while scaling up to handle exponential growth in data-sets and user requests successfully. He also asserts that the techniques have remained a dark art.
I don't agree with the second part. There are many out there that beat the same problem (I had the good fortune of working with one such company). Those who have won have solved the problem by creating a solution that is tailored to their context in conjunction with well known techniques for scaling and redundancy. Everyone has to start someplace, I recommend – "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley.
"Growing up is hard" – Werner Vogels on All things distributed.
To those who still read this blog. I am growing (up) and this blog is beginning to suffer. I am working on fixing that problem (not the part where I am growing 😉 ). Until then, thanks for stopping by.