[herewego]

Fair enough. I got about 1500 words into it and said to myself, this is a book I'm trying to fit into a post. Such is the reality of complex topics like these.

I agree with most of the points you're making, but I also think that its important to remember that most people have no idea about what's even involved in the basics. Your points are advanced and are details that are VERY important, but are beyond the scope of a post. If the criteria for trying to put into words some of the concepts behind scalability were that you need to be writing a dissertation to do so, then we would live in a sadly uninformed world.

My intent wasn't to make it a thorough primer so much as to touch on some of the concepts involved in making scalability a reality in day-to-day development of web applications: scalable datastorage, scalable application layers, etc. I hope the readers see it for what it is and then go do further research of their own.