High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

G'day,

I'm building an application to manage WordPress PHP code on many servers. Our application will push down code updates to each server, as well as performing backups and testing.

I'm considering different methods of pushing updated code onto the individual servers. I'm considering something like Capistrano (I've no experience in Ruby though). I've also considered using subversion and then remotely calling svn commands via SSH.

Are there any other tools specifically for this purpose? The servers will have persistent data (the WordPress databases) so I don't want to re-image them every update. Plus, they will each have a different set of plugins / themes, so building many images would be too complex.

If there are any papers on code deployment, or other recommended reading, please point the links my way.

Likewise, if anyone has any suggestions, or would like more details, just let me know.

Cheers - Callum.

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.