The challenges of managing a megaservice
The Mount Everest of E-mail Services (Source: ACM Queue, Author: Ben Fried) — “Our operations group never wants to rely on any sort of user interface. Everything has to be scriptable and run from some sort of command line. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to execute scripts and gather the results over thousands of machines.”
An interface need not be graphical to be an interface.
Note: This is an interview with Hotmail engineer Phil Smoot.
p.s. Terrible navigation between the pages of the article. There was no easy way for me to get to the end of the article.