I’m highly recommend the following videos to any IT person for developing web application. Although I have only watched 2 videos, YouTube and Goolge Talk presentations; they already brow my mind. It is not just because how great the solution, truely there is no one magic solution fits every application/system; it is more about how solution was came out for fixing the performance and scalability in limited resources issues, either short or long term.
Good presentation overall, Enjoy!
Google scalability conference 2007
YouTube Scalability
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6304964351441328559
Building a Scalable Resource Management
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3937025764791991714
Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2727172597104463277
Lessons In Building Scalable Systems
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6202268628085731280
MapReduce Used on Large Data Sets
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=741403180270990805
Scaling Google for Every User
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7039469220993285507
SCTPs Reliability and Fault Tolerance
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=210885113635893162
Cheers!