If you are really into the nuts and bolts of data centers, large scale networks, and large scale computing then James Hamilton‘s posts make for some good reading. He’s a “Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services team”, which is really just the tip of the iceberg in his work history.
So why read his posts? Because he talks about some of the hard problems faced in the world of data centers. Take for instance his recent High Scale Network Research post. How would you put together a reasonably priced test bed to stress your new network configuration/hardware that has to support 10,000 servers?
I’ll be honest, I don’t fully understand everything that James writes. That’s part of the reason why he’s on my recommended reading list, trying to follow along makes me work intellectually.