Dare has a good writeup of the keynote from the Seattle Conference on Scalability. It sounds like a pretty interesting conference, with presentations from Google, Amazon, Verisign and more.

The Google talk covered the three big, gutsy parts of Google's architecture: GFS, BigTable and MapReduce. By building their systems from scratch, Google is able to scale to the phenomenal size it is now.

Technologies like these are how Google can handle millions of different search phrases -- amazingly, one in four queries to their search engine have never been seen before.

Google hires smart people and lets them work in small teams of 3 to 5 people. They can get away with teams being that small because they have the benefit of an infrastructure that takes care of all the hard problems so devs can focus on building interesting, innovative apps.