Starting with the punk rock creation story, Brewer’s CAP Theorem discusses the fascinating, proven theorem that you can’t have all three of consistency, availability, and partition-tolerance in a distributed system.
A very interesting follow-up is: A CAP Solution (Proving Brewer Wrong). It approaches the problem by dynamically guaranteeing different CAP properties instead of trying to guarantee them all at once.
Although it’s been a few years since I switched from full-time Sysadmin to full-time Coder, being in a startup means getting saddled with an opsy task now and again regardless of your “title”.
The problem: We bought a bunch of servers which need minimal OS, IP and a hostname before they’re racked. In otherwords, we want to drop them in a datacenter, turn them on, and leave knowing there’s remote SSH access. Data centers are environmentally hostile (hot rows, cold rows, too loud). It’s ideal to get in and out as quickly as possible and do any remaining config while listening to music and having a cup of tea.