In the paper Cloud Computing Architecture for Social Computing - A Comparison Study of Facebook and Google, which is published by Bo Wen Yang, authors compares the architecture between Google and Facebook Cloud Computing Architecture.
According to resource scarcity, there is a tradeoff between the application functionality versus future scalability.
The typical distributed architecture consists of a number of layers:
Application logic ( Ruby on Rails, Scala )
Caching ( Memcache, SQL query caching )
Database backend ( RDBMS clusters, CouchDB, Google's BigTable or Amazon's Dynamo )
Business model, server hardware, data center and distributed architecture.
