Scalable Internet Architectures

Working in Production Environments

There are so many different levels of production environments that it is difficult to speak to them all. The principles in this chapter can be applied to any important computing environment. Because this book is about Internet architectures, we won’t address anything but the infrastructure used to directly service customers over the Internet.

Because most large architectures are run by multidisciplinary teams, there tend to be more than one set of guidelines for avoiding failure.

In the end it comes down to “don’t be stupid.” Although this is a simple and an intuitive expectation, what is clearly “stupid” on a small architecture is often subtle on large architectures run by multiple teams. There are three reasons ...