"It took a few months of learning about network topologies, Redis, ØMQ, LXC, redundancy, distributed systems" <- what did you read exactly? books? blogs? thx D:
A lot of Googling, most of which concentrated on StackOverflow discussions. Redis and ØMQ both have fantastic documentation, so it's easy to get started there; LXC was really a matter of trial and error. As for the more abstract concepts (networking/distributed computing), I would start on a Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing for instance) and click links and jump from article to article for hours.
