Behind the Scenes at Hotmail

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:12AM from the that's-a-big-datacenter-you-have-grandma dept.

mallumax writes "ACM Queue interviews Hotmail engineer Phil Smoot on how they manage more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe. Between them, they process billions of emails per day and are overseen by hundreds of administrators. To do that they have returned to the command line. From the article: 'Our operations group never wants to rely on any sort of user interface. Everything has to be scriptable and run from some sort of command line'. The overriding philosophy seems to be KISS. Also: tape backups are out and spam levels have stabilized."

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Still running *NIX? by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-13 04:18 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Isn't this the same Hotmail that started out running Linux or a UNIX?

Then Redmond purchased to try to show that Windoze scaled just as well as *NIX ...and Windoze died under the load that the *NIX environment handled with aplomb.

I guess they finally managed to migrate it to Windoze... I think it very amusing that they avoid the GUI and are a CLI/scripted environment. The more things change, the more they stay the same.