Besides the issues we've touched on for local load balancing, a number of other questions are raised by the scaling problems Web installations face in the future.

Content Distribution

Distributing and synchronizing the content of complex Web sites can the bane of some publishing operations' existence. FTP might be OK for content distribution of limited scope but it's not well suited for ongoing, repeated synchronizations with growing numbers of destinations.

Cluster Management

Besides the content, the other items that must be managed include the Web server process and configurations. Additionally, one might consider ways to perform system management remotely with all or most of the same capabilities one has sitting in front of console.

Distributed Load Balancing

The Web server deployments of the future will have to take advantage of the high capacity data centers dispersed around the network to adequately scale up and serve their audience most networkly proximate to where they are.