Build scalable systems that handle failure withtout losing data

I found a very interesting article on the MSDN Architecture Center illustrates a real life use case about scalable systems. Designing and building scalable systems is one of the major challenges of Software Engineers. A lot of best practices and patterns exist on the web illustrating the problem, but the specific design and the implementation differ in projects. This article tells a real life example of such a system and the essential steps that were done in order to build a scalable system that also handle failure without losing data. The following topics are covered:

• HTTP and Message Loss
• Durable Messaging
• Systems Consistency
• Transactional Messaging
• Transient Conditions
• Deserialization Errors
• Messages in the Error Queue
• Time and Message Loss
• TimetoBeReceived
• Call Stack Problems
• Large Messages
• Small Messages from Large
• Idempotent Messaging
• Long-Running Processes
• Learning from Mistakes