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Behind the Scenes at Hotmail

Posted by Zonk on 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."

6 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. holy hell cornduck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    sniff the stinky spot!

  2. boooring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    dumb story, next?

  3. Ofcouse they use KISS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Keep It Simple Stupid, so they acknowlegde that they are stupid!

  4. Oh, come on..... by TheDoctorWho · · Score: -1, Troll

    It's like one commercial after another. 'See how great we are!!'

    It's funny they won't use a GUI interface, but then they Work for MS so they might know better than to trust one from MS.

  5. Re:UNIX? by GoodOmens · · Score: 1, Troll

    While there were initial problems migrating to Windows, 100% of Hotmail now runs on Windows.

    No wonder hotmail sucks. Then again I am a diehard gmail fan :-p

  6. Hundreds of admins for 10K servers is not so hot by gelfling · · Score: -1, Troll

    It's mediocre at best. Even with 'only' 200 admins that's a support ratio of 50:1 which is not all that great. We do 3-4x easily.