Cool new Middleware from Twitter for distributed data

http://bit.ly/a6ZwyV

"Twitter last night offered up the code for Gizzard, an open-source framework for accessing distributed data quickly, which Twitter built to help the site deal with the millions of requests it gets from users needing access to their friends and their own tweets. It could become an important component of building out web-based businesses, much likeFacebook’s Cassandra project has swept through the ranks of webscale startups and even big companies.
Gizzard is a middleware networking service that sits between the front-end web site client and the database and attempts to divide and replicate data in storage in intelligent ways that allows it to be accessed quickly by the site. Gizzard’s function it to take the requests coming in through the fire hose and allocate the stream of requests across multiple databases without slowing things down. It’s also fault-tolerant, which means if one section of data is compromised, the service will try to route to other sections. From the Twitter blog post:"
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