[bifrost]

I can't say I think this has ever been really true: "Performance speed is no longer the primary worry. Time to market speed is."

Performance has been a concern but programatic loadbalancing has been around for decades. When I worked at MSN/Linkexchange back in the late 90's we never really worried heavily about the performance of the language we used (Perl) because we could scale out servers. Perl isn't that speedy but it sure was easy to develop in. We served a billion and a half clicks per month with 8-10 machines from a single datacenter before I left, with Perl.