Basic Concepts Node - a server that stores data Cluster - a collection of nodes Index - collection of similar documents Distributed Data A shard is a subset of the index data. Solves the problem where the size of an index exceeds the hardware limit of a single node.
3rd-party image processing/manipulation services Everything http://www.imgix.com/ http://cloudinary.com/ http://www.cdnconnect.com/ http://cloudresize.com/