James has put out a lot of great material. He's given a talk series and wrote a conference paper called "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" whi

James has put out a lot of great material. He's given a talk series and wrote a conference paper called "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" which is a trove of valuable design insights: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton_html/ https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/... (somewhat condensed) Slides from a talk: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf He writes some of the more practical and useful advice I've seen about how to run a successful business based on high-scale distributed systems. One of his mnemonics that's stuck with me is the "Four Rs" of recovery-oriented computing: Restart, Reboot, Reimage, Replace (slide 6 in PDF). A human shouldn't be engaged to troubleshoot a problem until the platform has first tried in successing to restart the software, reboot the OS, re-image the machine, and finally replace the hardware entirely. After these auto-recovery steps have failed, only then is it time to engage a human. He describes the connection between these techniques and significantly lower operations costs.