Turing Award Winner Jim Gray interviews Amazon CTO Werner Voegels for ACM Queue. Good insights ensue.
Just a morsel, but Amazon proves the adage: "any useful complex system is grown from a simple working system."
I've talked about "Google scale" problems, but there's also a whole bin of "Amazon scale" problems which might not have the same order of magnitude of data to deal with, but whose interactivity requirements make for very different engineering challenges.