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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."
From the article:
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Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all.
From the summary:
Between them, they process billions of emails per day and are overseen by hundreds of administrators.
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Yes. Hotmail was originally run on clusters of E3500 and E4500's running Solaris 2.5.1. After they got bought by Microsoft, a major initiative to migrate all boxes to Windows was undertaken in 2000. Hotmail has been 99.9% Windows for over 3 years now. The remaining 0.1% are some legacy solaris boxes used to handle backups for clusters... and even they are being phased out slowly.
--Amoeba (who no longer works there)
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
FreeBSD. Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000 Technical Case Study
This is only half true. The _front end_ runs on Windows with IIS. The _back end_, where the email data is stored (the User Stores), are Solaris. The front end machines dont mean much. If one or twenty go down, there are tons more to take their place. They are simply removed from the load balancing and marked as "admin plz fix this some day". The back end machines however, are super critical, as each user lives one one, and only one, user store. That machine goes down, and hundreds of thousands, to millions, of Hotmail users cant get to their mail. And thats why those machines run Solaris.