Bittorrent used to deploy updates
I just watched a video from Larry Gadea working at Twitter: Twitter - Murder Bittorrent Deploy System (speaking at CUSEC 2010). Briefly, the problem Twitter was facing was the deployment of updates to thousands of servers in a short amount of time and dealing with errors (broken servers, e.g.). A nice, simple, cool and free way of solving this issue was to use the Bittorrent protocol (via Python and a stack of other free software) to actually deploy updates. In summary, you go from a unique repository facing thousands requests approximately at the same time: ...