infrastructure

All my posts about infrastructure.

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You should not run your mail server because mail is hard.

poolp.org

Contrary to the title, Gilles Chehade that it's acutually doable running your own mailserver.

TL;DR: Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it. Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing. Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none …

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Varnish explained

Varnish is a piece of software that, amongst other things, can make your website much faster. In a new post on his blog, Mattias Geniar tells you all about it.

Varnish can do a lot of things, but it's mostly known as a reverse HTTP proxy. It brands itself as an HTTP accelerator, making HTTP requests faster by caching them. ... Varnish is usually associated with performance, but it greatly increases your options to scale your infrastructure (load balancing, failover backends etc) and adds a security layer right out of the box: you can easily let Varnish protect you from the httpoxy vulnerability or slowloris type attacks.

https://ma.ttias.be/varnish-explained/

Be sure to watch Mattias' excellent talk he gave at this years Laracon:

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Facebook's mobile device lab

As a user I've pretty much turned my back to Facebook, but boy must it be interesting to work at that scale. Here's how Facebook built their mobile device lab.

... We needed to be able to run tests on more than 2,000 mobile devices to account for all the combinations of device hardware, operating systems, and network connections that people use to connect on Facebook. Today, in our Prineville data center, we have a mobile device lab — outfitted with a custom-built rack — that allows us to run tests on thousands of phones. The process of building a lab in our data center wasn't a direct path, and we learned a lot along the way...

https://code.facebook.com/posts/300815046928882/the-mobile-device-lab-at-the-prineville-data-center/

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 21.23.13

I stumbled on this story via Bram.us. Subscribe to the RSS feed of that site if you haven't done so already.

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