I think this qualifies as a Frequently Asked Question when to comes to Joomla implementation:

Can it up-scale reliably?

The answer has always been “yes” since the days of Joomla 1.0, but achieving that goal was a tricky affair.

You had to set-up a cluster using HAProxy/Keepalived in front of your (two or more) Joomla webservers, and have them connect to the same database/Db cluster.

And trying this on Windows servers would have made you the butt of many cruel jokes. It had to be Linux!

Booby Trap(sss)

There were some other niggles and gotchas for the unwary, too. Like getting errors if your variable secret is not the same on each servers’ configuration.php.

There were also issues around writing to and reading from the same database store, so this required a lot of technical expertise.

And why go to all this trouble for a CMS, when there’s Ruby on Rails etc. that can do this out of the box?

First, because Joomla is not a CMS. That’s right, it’s way more than that. The CMS portion of it happens to be the most visible. There are so many hidden application features under the hood just waiting for you to discover (MVC, ORM, etc.) and I wonder why this is not so widely known.

Easy On The Next Person

Second, I like that operating Joomla is not that hard. Once you learn it (from a user perspective) one size fits all. This removes the training headaches associated with handing over the project (to a customer, admin, developer, whatever). Plus the Core Joomla community is a great crowd.

(I know Drupal is better at this. I like Drupal, but there’s something special about Joomla’s inner works).

Cloud Nine

Imagine my excitement then, when I learned that automatic scaling cloud services were increasing their support for Joomla!

Check out this post on mattbeckman.com as well as www.scalemysite.com for more details.