「Facebookなど」とのことですが、
スケーラブルなWebサービスの構築法に関しては、以下の書籍が参考になるかと思います。
Scalable Internet Architectures (Developer's Library)
なお、Facebook社で使用されている技術について
ネット上にて公表されているものを
個別に掘り下げて調査するという方法もあるかと思います。
以下に技術情報が記載されているサイトを挙げさせていただきます。
Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site | Royal Pingdom
At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that
Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software. Not only do we use a lot of open source, but our engineering team has released and contributed to many different projects. Developers not only build with Connect and Platform, but then scale using many of the same infrastructure technologies that we use.
また、少し前のものですが、以下のようなビデオもあります。
InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph
In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe.
Perspectives - Facebook Cassandra Architecture and Design
Last July, Facebook released Cassandra to open source under the Apache license: Facebook Releases Cassandra as Open Source. Facebook uses Cassandra as email search system where, as of last summer, they had 25TB and over 100m mailboxes. This video gets into more detail on the architecture and design: http://www.new.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=540974400803#/vide... My notes are below if you don’t feel like watching the video.
神さま