This could be better titled as 'Operations Magic Cure: Test Like A Madman'. It's not the act of restarting the servers that solves problems. Rather, their nig

This could be better titled as 'Operations Magic Cure: Test Like A Madman'. It's not the act of restarting the servers that solves problems. Rather, their nightly reboot policy forces them to have all of the infrastructure in place to be able to rotate servers in and out of service quickly. It forces them to centrally manage configuration. It forces them to architect their software and networks to handle restarts. They use server restarts as a way to force all of these things to be in place, which isn't such a bad idea. More importantly, it doesn't sound like they use the nightly restarts as a substitute for actual troubleshooting (e.g., rebooting a server to 'fix' a problem, rather than figuring out what's really going on).