Live-upgrading a Linux image at scale (Google 2013) [pdf]

I came across this while digging for early stories on how Google employees chose a Linux distribution to champion and get behind.

There are some amazing feats of hackery embedded in this slide deck (notably, they converted .rpm packages to the .deb package format, so that they could migrate dependencies separately from the base OS), so I thought it’d be fun to share! It’s a sysadmin nightmare that they somehow made in to great fun, by treating it as an engineering problem.

If you have your own links to similar varieties of lore, I hope you’ll share them in the comments!