Running an SME on Debian

In this talk, I would like to share our success story running skroutz.gr, one of Greece's most-visited websites, using Debian with over 400 installations covering every tier, from core routers, to servers, development workstations and support desktops. The prospective audience for this talk are primarily system administrators, but its scope is broad enough to include bits on packaging, contributing etc. The key points include:

• Maintaining a relationship with Debian: how, when and what to contribute, how to get your sysadmins involved.
• Sysadmin-friendly packaging in the age of Puppet: playing nice with both sysadmins and configuration management tools.
• Internal repository organization and package versioning; how to make sure your own packages play well with Debian's.
• Leveraging Debian's own automation mechanisms in a highly automated environment; taming d-i preseeding and putting dpkg-divert to good use.
• Applying security updates semi-automatically on a fleet of 300 servers.
• Using Debian on the network: highly available routing and firewalling, using multiple upstream providers.
• What we could do in Debian to further ease adoption by SMEs.

• Slides
• Video