2008 I was founder of the social network application and startup metalcon.de. Since the software was like a typical student project at that time php/mysql based it did not scale well. During my time at the university we developed a distributed service oriented technology stack to be able to scale out the platform.
Some of the most interesting technologies consisted of my open source news feed server graphity which is able to serve about 10k individual newsfeeds per second in a social network of millions of users with a couple 100 write requests per second. Also I have experience with highly compressed and efficient autocompletions indices.
You started out with a monolithic Web Service or App and your realize now that no matter how much hardware you add your service does not scale? Need to decouple your software towards a service oriented design? I am confident I will be able to help you out. So why don’t we start a conversation right now?