[mark-ruwt]

Surely! Our business is mainly an API that B-to-B customers consume. The strategy is to create identical "pods" in different cities across different providers on identical distros. Between Vultr, Linode, and DO, that's 20+ cities you could place a pod in the States alone. Each pod has a proxy up front, a database slave, and a pair of app server and cache machines.

Ignoring tweaks for international customers, each proxy is in an A record round-robin with health checks via Route 53. US-based requests get forwarded to one of the pods, and the proxy either handles the request with local servers, or points to servers in another pod if it has servers that are down. If any pod has a power outage or goes down for any reason, Route 53 automatically pulls the entire pod out of the rotation. If an entire provider goes dark, all of the pods get pulled out of the rotation, but all the others keep running.

[nullgeo]

This is very cool. Where can I learn more about stuff like this, and what are the prerequisites for learning something like this? I have a BSc in CS and understand OSes and programming languages pretty well.

[mark-ruwt]

Posts on http://highscalability.com can get a bit hardcore, but there's a lot of great knowledge there.

[nullgeo]

Thanks a lot for your help!