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Behind the Scenes at Hotmail
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."
The overriding philosophy seems to be KISS.
Don't try to tell me that the guys at Hotmail only want to Rock & Roll all night and party every day?!?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
..who they call for support? :-)
"Between them, they process billions of emails per day and are overseen by hundreds of administrators."
And how does the NSA process all that email? Now THAT would be an interesting technical challenge!
What OS it runs on and which web server? I am not trying to be funny.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
I always thought that the command line was a user interface. You know, interfacing between a user and a computer.
It's hard to picture using a computer without any sort of user interface. I'm pretty sure that, in order to call it "using" a computer, some sort of interface must exist, be it keyboard mouse and monitor, binary switch, light gun, real gun, neural link, telekinesis, or whatever. Otherwise, you're not using it, are you?
On the other hand, maybe the article is correct- a lot of operations group probably don't want to use "any sort of user interface" to communicate with their computers. They want to be sitting on a beach in tahiti drinking daiquiris, thousands of miles away from the computers they're supposed to maintain.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Stabilized at 100% of bandwidth.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
Bingo! See, that's why they need 10000 servers spread around the world to keep the thing (barely) affloat. Had they stayed on FreeBSD they could have run the whole operation on a Duron 800 with a good DSL connection! I mean, just look at GMail. Ok, that runs on Linux, so it needs a little more power, probably a Centrino (which is why you get those "temporarily unavailable" thingies when the administrator takes the laptop home). 10000 servers is just bad Karma for migrate the thing to NT-Server :P
Could anyone suggest a better rhyme for spam?
There once was a young man name Sam,
Who spent his whole day sending spam.
But at night he went drinking,
And this led him to thinking,
That maybe he would end up being damned!
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The way you call "Windows" "Windoze" is very funny and original. Very funny indeed.
AT first, it was BSD running on a bunch of identical custom-made sub-1U servers. But No! Then it was replaced by windows boxes . . . racks and racks of 99c Fry's keyboards velcroed to the backs and fronts of racks, with miles of small-gauge track, upon which ran diabolical steam-powered robots, each with a single arm and with fingers at the end, forever fixed at the precise spacing to stab the keyboards' CTRL-ALT-DEL keys. Noisily the robots rumbled back and forth on their appointed rounds . . .
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Speaking of English, most speakers frown on the use of long run-on sentences.
Simple. It's PHB-speak. Haven't you ever read Dilbert?
Slashdot - where to disagree, is to be a troll
Because his team leverages best-of-breed systems to utilize the synergistic effects of the paradigm shift in relationships among stakeholders and the knowledge infrastructure, silly.
hang brain.
What about Return on Investment? Don't forget your Core Competencies.