If you find stories about scaling interesting, then this post on how Twitter handles over 3k images per second might be worth your time.
Some takeaway points listed that I appreciated: “Doing the simplest thing that can possibly work can really screw you” and “Experiment and research.”
I absolutely loved reading this post in the context of thinking about media on WordPress websites. I think there are both takeaways core WordPress could make as well as folks building massive scale websites. This was the most fascinating technical article I’ve read today.