Reading this I'm mostly shocked that groups had the power to throw boxes onto their outward-facing infrastructure and she had to handle that reactively. Like, it's not "requisition a public network server" but rather "you just jam it out there and we'll either baby it or boot it". That's crazy loose for a major corp.
Think "hardware groups with next generation experimental hardware". Facebook runs their own data centers, including designing their own servers. How do you verify that the servers actually perform well? One natural choice was to put them to work as web servers. Given its size, there was a lot of tooling there to be able to measure very precisely what the throughput of a web server was, so things like "How many of these new servers should we order" could be answered, in addition to the "does the rack catch fire" questions.
One example of a source of tension that such standards were trying to deal with here was in a group trying to run web servers on machines with SSDs that were way too small: obviously for the bean counter saving a bunch of money on the SSDs was nice, but for the team trying to make sure the disk can fit all the code and logs on it, it was less nice.
