InfoQ: Horizontal Scalability via Transient, Shardable, and Share-Nothing Resources

beyond SQL databases and OO languages:
key/value caching and data storage
and functional languages...

Adam Wiggins believes that now is the time of horizontal scalability achieved by using resources that are transient, shardable and share nothing with other resources. He gives as example several applications and a language: memcached, CouchDB, Hadoop, Redis, Varnish, RabbitMQ, Erlang, detailing how each one applies those principles.
 
http://adam.blog.heroku.com/