I tried Hittail a year ago, and didn't quite work for me. I ended up writing a few scripts myself.
But I heard in Rob's latest podcast that Hittail is growing 30% per month.
There are different levels of scaling, and for different kinds of apps, the trade offs that you can make are different.
Unless you are making a really huge leap, most of the time it will be a gradual process. So unless you are talking Google or Twitter Scale in a matter of months, it may not be as bad as it sounds.
Monitor, optimize your current configurations, cache, load balance, cluster, use messaging, use existing industry knowledge on distributed systems, read academic papers and innovate...
For advanced distributed systems, checkout Prof. Indranil Gupta's lectures amont many others:
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/class/fa10/cs425/lectures.html
Most likely they would be using Nginx. I find the offering interesting because most of the companies in need of a load balancer would be able to configure Nginx load balancer quite easily. Not knowing underlying technology and not being able to go deep into modifying the algorithms and other aspects of load balancer makes me slightly uncomfortable, so why should we go with it? The only positive aspect of this offering is automatic health check but Nginx does that already.
I think this offering is nothing more than a GUI for generating nginx configuration files.
Most people able to launch and configure Amazon AMIs could configure Nginx too. Yet Amazon offers Elastic Load Balancers. There's a huge market for stuff like this -- just because you can muddle your way through configuring an instance doesn't mean you want to be in charge of configuring and running all the moving parts.
It's a custom implementation. They were vague on giving any details, but if I recall correctly it was written in Python. So probably a Twisted, Gevent, or Eventlet implementation.
Groovy doesn't get enough press in HN but I would think Groovy is practically the most widely used of them all just because of Grails.
I prefer Scala when I am doing backend stuffs but use Groovy/Grails for web stuffs.
I don't know, there might be a way to do it still for Canada. For example cooks and chefs can get a PR card o_o, it would be good for your health to take up a 1 year cooking sabbatical or something (geek out about diet and such). Australia accepts computer professionals on arrival also under the software engineer category (60 points, pretty good!) with a skills test. Australians also have a TN like arrangement with the us, but it's a dual intent visa (E-3) so it's even easier to get the green card. The waiting period although is 6 years (5 years + 1 year citizenship test & passport generation). Singapore is also extremely quick if he has the gumption to start a consulting business there, or get employment, it's possible to get PR in 6 months and singapore also has a special TN type H1B. Singapore although is a 1 passport citizenship, it's major downfall. Mexico also has the TN arrangement along with Canada as a part of NAFTA and Chile also has a TN like arrangement also. The somewhat open secret with these TN visas is that even if they are not dual intent, if your willing to stay in the country until green card and renew inside until you have it you can still successfully for permanent residence. You can also apply directly outside of the USA for permanent residence under the EB-* visas. You'll be waiting years and have to have a really really nice employer/friends who's willing to wait that long. There are also the dual intent L-1A, L-1B visas. There are options for immigrating to the USA, even if it might take 20 years in the end...
