Not sure where to put this.. I did not see a sysadmin sub or sre sub where this would probably fit better. Either way, if you are in tech it might be a good read. Archive: https://archive.today/GIUMr From the post: "Two decades ago, Google had a pair of small datacenters, each housing a few thousand servers, connected in a ring by a pair of 2.4G network links. We ran our private cloud (though we didn't call it that at the time) using Python scripts such as "Assigner" and "Autoreplacer" and "Babysitter" which operated on config files full of individual server names. We had a small database of the machines (MDB) which helped keep information about individual servers organized and durable. Our small team of engineers used scripts and configs to solve some common problems automatically, and to reduce the manual labor required to manage our little fleet of servers."