These seem to be standard guidelines most tech companies have followed for the past 10 years. What I would like to add to this is metrics collection through som

These seem to be standard guidelines most tech companies have followed for the past 10 years. What I would like to add to this is metrics collection through something ganglia will give you an overall view of performance and usage across your servers, not just at that point in time but summarized over an hour, day, week, month. I cant tell you how helpful that kind of thing can be. And you can add your own stats to it as well very easily to track any number of things. I've added mail, apache and release graphing to my stats. John Allspaw of Etsy, formerly of Flickr is huge on metrics collection, so is John Adams of Twitter. It plays a key role in assessing where you've been and where you are going.