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"Razor is an advanced provisioning application which can deploy both bare-metal and virtual systems. It's aimed at solving the problem of how to bring new metal into a state where your existing DevOps/configuration management workflows can take it over. Newly added machines in a Razor deployment will PXE-boot from a special microkernel image, then check in, provide Razor with inventory information, and wait for further instructions. Razor will consult user-created policy rules to choose which preconfigured model to apply to a new node, which will begin to follow the model's directions, giving feedback to Razor as it completes various steps. Models can include a handoff to a configuration management system or to another system capable of controlling the node (such as a vCenter server taking possession of ESX systems)."

"Collins exists to drive infrastructure automation. Someone recently asked me to describe collins in a sentence. At Tumblr, it's the infrastructure source of truth and knowledge. Everything about Tumblr production environments is stored and encoded in Collins, and that data is used to drive all of our automation. Sometimes people refer to systems like this as a CMDB, or Configuration Management DataBase. Collins started as a system to manage all of the physical servers, switches, racks, etc in Tumblr production environments. As we started to inventory hardware, IP addresses, software, and so on, we found the API and data gave us an excellent way to drive automation processes. Today Collins can do push button cluster (HBase, Hadoop, web, etc) deployment, drive configuration generation when hardware cluster topologies change, drive infrastructure updates when software configuration changes, and help manage software deploys. Because of the loosely coupled design of Collins, consistently applied conventions are a system requirement. This document serves as a guide to those conventions as well as the basic core concepts of the collins system. If you're just interested in the basic howto or screenshots, click here."

Lennart Poettering's (the guy behind systemd) opinion on how nowadays distribution and packaging systems should be completely remodelled... You might consider this post heretical, absurd or ingenious - so please read at your own risk ;-)

Description of the architecture of the Docker based PaaS Flynn. Interesting mention to scheduler, etc.

Great reading list for course Berkeley CS286: Implementation of Database Systems, Fall 2014.

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. - Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey A big part of scaling up an engineering team is getting serious about monitoring and alerts.