High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Greg Linden links to a heavily lesson ladened LISA 2007 paper titled On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services by James Hamilton of the Windows Live Services Platform group. I know people crave nitty-gritty details, but this isn't a how to configure a web server article. It hitches you to a rocket and zooms you up to 50,000 feet so you can take a look at best web operations practices from a broad, yet practical perspective. The author and his team of contributors obviously have a lot of in the trenches experience. Many non-obvious topics are covered. And there's a lot to learn from.

The paper has too many details to cover here, but the big sections are:

From their website:
FAI is an automated installation tool to install or deploy Debian GNU/Linux and other distributions on a bunch of different hosts or a Cluster. It's more flexible than other tools like kickstart for Red Hat, autoyast and alice for SuSE or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris. FAI can also be used for configuration management of a running system.

You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on all your machines, without any interaction necessary. FAI it's a scalable method for installing and updating all your computers unattended with little effort involved. It's a centralized management system for your Linux deployment.

From their website:
Simply put, Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines. It is ideal for anyone doing any kind of system administration, either professionally or incidentally.

* Great for automating tasks via SSH on remote servers, like software installation, application deployment, configuration management, ad hoc server monitoring, and more.
* Ideal for system administrators, whether professional or incidental.
* Easy to customize. Its configuration files use the Ruby programming language syntax, but you don't need to know Ruby to do most things with Capistrano.
* Easy to extend. Capistrano is written in the Ruby programming language, and may be extended easily by writing additional Ruby modules.