Hello. I'm a skill and competent programmer but haven't really delved into the realms of server administration beyond a single server. I'm working a project that requires me to scale an app across multiple servers as traffic increases and want to know some resources for learning the ins and outs. Books, online resources, etc. Load balancing, database clustering federating or whatever the terms are, software architecture and how to go about administrating the servers, etc.
I want it to be similar in nature to google's app engine in that once the app is built it scales automatically and I don't need to modify the code after the fact as things get bigger.
http://highscalability.com/
I bookmarked an AskSlashdot thread on a similar topic a while ago but Slashdot has archived the original thread so here is the google cache entry, look at the O'Reilly books they should answer a lot of your questions.
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:eugOZQ5ltGwJ:ask.slashd...
A final word of caution though, There is no silver bullet. You are your applications best scalability expert.