Hola mi amigo! I have this thesis paper I'm doing on web scalability, and I find myself short of resources. Googling just doesn't give me back what I want. So I was wondering if you knew any books/sites/people/resources/other that could be helpful?

–Scalia

Hey Scalia- I think the difficulty is that scalability on the web is a huge and loosely-defined topic, similar (and related) to "the cloud". Each has become more of a buzzword than carrying any specific meaning, but I'd break "web scalability" down to a few things:

Low latency: Complete requests as quickly as possible.
High concurrency: Handle as many simultaneous requests as possible.
High availability: Resilience to increased load, system failure, etc.
Easy/fast expansion of resources: The ability to grow (ideally, automatically) to achieve any of the above, generally under increased demand. See horizontal and vertical scalability.

From my coworker @tolsenator: "scalability is the ability to handle increased load/traffic while staying performant and available." High throughput under high demand. Ways to be "scalable" are also hard to generalize because the solutions tend to be somewhat system-specific. I don't know of any guides specifically, but a quick Google of "scability book" turned up some matches. For your thesis, though, your best bet might be to focus on a handful of case studies. Some good places to find these are http://highscalability.com/, GigaOM, and InfoQ. Hope that helps! -Aidan P.S. My favorite "web-scale" story is from Netflix. They obviously have to deal with huge demand (up to one-third of all internet traffic at peak times), and their only way to ensure stability is to constantly test themselves by inducing system failure. In other words, they created a program called Chaos Monkey that intermittently kills random servers.