Explore strategies for building scalable and distributed systems in this 55-minute PHP UK Conference talk. Learn how to handle sudden traffic spikes and improve service availability by applying principles from ant colonies to your applications. Discover the benefits of load balancers, message queues, Gearman, Memcache, and daemons for achieving greater performance, redundancy, and scalability. Follow along as the speaker guides you through the process of transforming average applications into manageable, distributed systems. Gain insights into decoupling, elastic behavior, high availability, and best practices for implementing distributed infrastructures in PHP-based services.