Modern System Administration

Chapter 3. Storage

Think about any contemporary product website; it’s the virtual front door of a business and one common managed system. I have handled many websites over the years with various responsibilities, including system design; the web servers and database servers; backups; all the generated assets, including pictures of products, testimonial videos, and logged user activities like searches and purchases; and updates to any backend inventory systems.

There are lots of hidden decisions for artifact storage. Imagine managing that product website; when someone searches for the product on the website and lands on the product page, the action generates multiple log entries that have to stream somewhere. Every time someone purchases the product, order information, shipment details, and the product’s availability need to be updated because your company doesn’t want to sell something that it doesn’t have. Building out the system you’d need for this website requires planning the appropriately sized computing environment and appropriately sized and scoped artifact storage to drive business decisions.

In the systems you manage, whether websites or some other system, you create strategies and make decisions for storage because you need to optimize assets differently. You don’t want to waste money on unneeded storage, or infrequently accessed data on more expensive low-latency storage. And for frequently accessed data, you want your users to have fast responses, which may even include ...