Challenges of keeping one of the Web’s largest and oldest Internet services running 24/7

In the landscape of today’s megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day.
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To understand how they do it, and to learn more about what it takes to manage such an enormous service, we invited Hotmail engineer Phil Smoot to speak with us.

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