First Part
For the first part of the question: there are a number of solutions that are regularly used on Linux/Unix machines for that sort of task. Some of them are even file system-level replication, like CODA, AFS etc. They aren't very widely used, though, but possible.
Another one is to just export the file system from one host to the other, using NFS, which is a type of file system and gets mounted when Linux boots, or WebDAV which needs an apache module or some other solution on the server side and gets mounted by the client the same way. These solutions are susceptible to downtime and data loss due to lack of redundancy: if the server crashes the files become unavailable. You can also use windows-born protocols like CIFS or the old SMB. iSCSI is also a newer option. All then them susceptible to the crashing-server downtime issue.
The most used solution for that task is a file-level replication application such as rsync. rsync will mirror the files from a server and make incremental updates, changing only the files that were altered on the server. It is pretty standard and easy to setup and learn. There are other options, of course, and searching for rsync will show you many of those.
Second Part
This seems to be distro-specific if you choose to use distribution provided packages for your server applications.
On Raspbian, which uses debian's dpkg tools like apt, aptitude and others, you can easily setup a cron job ("man cron" and "man crontab" on your pi console) that will execute a "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" to keep everything up-to-date.
This solution does not come without risks though. Auto-upgrading can, rarely, break your setup and need operator attention. If it is in auto mode and unsupervised, you might run into downtime from time to time.