Large scale architectures
TheServiceSide.Net posted an article on "five considerations for large-scale architectures" a while ago. If architecture is not your thing this article might be appealing to you.
If large-scale architecture on the other hand IS your thing I found a very interesting aproach to stateless Arcitecture on Tim Wolter's blog. I knew that Google had an architecture in which they keep all their data in memory without ever hitting the disk, which is in part one of the reasons why Google is so damn fast. What I did not know was that this approch actually had a name.
The basis for this article is actually quite current when looking at the major outages that have been occuring throughout web2.osphere recently...
Of course designing for these kind of architectures can be either a complete overkill ("will our service scale so far that we need to design for this?") or a wasted opportunity ("damn, our service scaled further than we ever had anticipated!").
The thing is, right now I am working on a pet project that might go totally unnoticed or become on of the hot items in .net developers land. Who knows? Will I architect for this? Looking at the little time I have... nah I don't think so :-) Very interesting nevertheless.