: The use of "cloud computing" is growing for these tasks now. Large web applications -- such as Facebook, for example -- are distributed, meaning that it's not on any one single server at

@Deb1703797

The use of "cloud computing" is growing for these tasks now. Large web applications -- such as Facebook, for example -- are distributed, meaning that it's not on any one single server at a time.

One approach to this has been messaging (CQRS) -- where, when the user initiates some action, a message is sent to a queue, as a type of command that the system responds to as soon as it is able. This way, if a certain facet of the system is down, the user can still see "Okay, your post has been created" (for example), even though it's still in the queue.

Designs of distributed systems vary (a Google search on this, or Wikipedia, would be most insightful here), but I know of some where a master copy of a database is kept, processing messages from the queue pretty much constantly, while read-only replications of it (or even just pieces of it) are being made across different systems so that the one single database isn't being hit thousands and thousands of times. In other words, one DB is being written to, but many are being read. When it's not mission-critical for it to be the exact, up-to-the-second data, then this is a good solution.

For more info:
abdullin.com/cqrs en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-query_separation en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing

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