As the internet grew in popularity around the turn of the century, the systems behind internet architecture began to change. When good ideas were built into popular websites, user traffic increased exponentially. It was not uncommon in 2001 for too much web traffic being the reason for a popular site being slow or a web server going down. Web architects quickly figured out that they could build out multiple instances of their website or application, and distribute traffic with load balancers.
While this helped, some parts of web architectures were difficult to scale out, and remained bottlenecks for performance. Key among them was the database. This problem was further illustrated by Dr. Eric Brewer and Dr. Armando ...
