What is a good deployment learning resource? [closed]

Question

I'm experienced in development but an idiot when it comes to web deployment. By deployment, I mean the 'instrastructure' aspects - how to get a box, setup a server, how to do redundancy for BCP, all that kind of stuff - not necessarily just pushing the code out.

I've largely done desktop work. When I've done web development, it's always been domain-related work and another team has taken care of deployment and the physical architecture. I'm actually pretty embarrassed about this deficiency in my skills and knowledge.

A recommended book or something like would be fabulous to help me see the big picture, different things that I need to consider before I start making decisions, basic practical network information, etc.

Unfortunately I don't know much about the stack (it's for an upcoming job). I'm more interested in the big pictures than specifics (if that's even possible). LAMP is probably a reasonable assumption.

Answer 1

The absolute best "learning resource" is an experienced sysadmin to mentor you - Speak to the team that handles the server bits (hardware, OS, network, etc.) and see if you can work with them on their next deployment.
There isn't really a single book or knowledge source we can point you to that will help you clear that gap, but having the desire to learn is definitely a great start, and most sysadmins wish that their developers had a better grasp of what has to be done in order to make the pretty parts of websites accessible to the world.

Some recommended reading (geared toward Unix environments since that's what I'm familiar with):

• The FreeBSD Handbook
  (Excellent for FreeBSD, but broadly applicable to Unix systems)
• Firewall redundancy with pf & CARP
  (Geared toward OpenBSD/pf/CARP, but the principles are generally applicable to network-level redundancy)
• Various questions here on ServerFault
  (search for "redundancy", "high availability", etc.)
• Specific questions here on ServerFault:
  What sysadmin things should every programmer know? is a good start.

Reading through these will undoubtedly bring up new questions - feel free to ask them :)