What We Should Strive Toward In Operations

I generally keep up with the O'Reilly Sysadmin blog (http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/), although I sometimes find the content and the frequency of updates disappointing. To be fair, you would probably say the same thing about this blog . However, today, they had a blog entry that pointed to another blog entry about "Operations Mantras" that I found interesting.

O'Reilly Link:
http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2008/02/operations_mantras.html

Operations Mantra Link:
http://dormando.livejournal.com/484577.html

It's a long read, and I'm not totally finished with it, but I found some useful thoughts and some points that give me self-affirmation that I'm not a total screw-up when it comes to system administration.

Some examples of points that I'm interested in following up on are

- In "Understand your data storage and databases", it suggests to investigate starling and Gearman
- The topics brought up in "Asynchronous Jobs"
- In "Use source control", avoid SVN and use Git or Mercurial instead (I'm assuming because these use distributed repositories for version control instead of a central one)

There are also some interesting technical and non-technical theories, practices, and procedures mentioned as well.