Pioneering the Cloud
Before AWS dominated the landscape, we were building cloud infrastructure from scratch. 2000+ bare metal servers, custom orchestration, and the audacity to serve 135 million users monthly.
Before AWS changed the game, we were building "cloud" infrastructure with bare metal servers, OpenVZ containers, and custom orchestration. At Playlist.com, I architected systems that served 135 million users monthly, all without the luxury of managed services.
The Architecture Challenge
Imagine building Spotify's infrastructure in 2008. Millions of songs, real-time streaming, social features, and user-generated playlists. We handled it all with custom-built solutions that would later become industry standards.
Infrastructure Scale
- • 2000+ bare metal servers
- • 135 million monthly users
- • 3 strategically located datacenters
- • Petabytes of media storage
Technologies Pioneered
- • OpenVZ virtualization
- • LVS load balancing
- • Custom CDN with edge servers
- • Distributed storage systems
Innovation Through Necessity
We couldn't just spin up EC2 instances or use S3. Every solution was built from scratch, tested under fire, and optimized for our specific needs. This meant writing kernel modules for traffic shaping, building custom monitoring systems, and creating deployment tools that predated modern DevOps.
"When you're serving millions of users on hardware you can touch, every decision matters. Every optimization counts. Every line of code has consequences."
Behind the Scenes
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Playlist.com Server Infrastructure (2011)
Managing Server Racks in the Datacenter
The Scale of Physical Infrastructure
24/7 Datacenter Operations
Lessons in Scale
Distributed Systems
Built redundancy into every layer. When you're responsible for millions of users' music libraries, downtime isn't an option.
Real-time Analytics
Created systems to process billions of events daily, providing insights that drove product decisions and caught issues before users noticed.
Cost Optimization
With physical hardware, you can't just scale up for peak traffic. We built systems that maximized every CPU cycle and byte of RAM.
This experience taught me to think in systems, not services. To build for reliability, not just functionality. Lessons that would prove invaluable in the cloud-native world to come.