[Discuss] Redundant array of inexpensive servers: clustering?

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

As I see it, the problem is that we still treat each and every HA cluster
as a unique snowflake and build the whole thing from scratch.

But while there are many aspects to HA that are dependent on the particular
set of services and applications being run,there are enough commonalities
that it should be possible to classify them into a taxonomy of common cases
and come up with standardized builds for each of those cases.

Christoph's talk a couple weeks ago on LXC and Docker, and Federico's talk
last year on OpenStack, look to me like the early stages of establishing
such a taxonomy and building an infrastructure to make the common cases
easier to develop and deploy.

Of course, some setups will still remain unique snowflakes, especially
those involving legacy applications, But then, adding HA to a legacy
application after the fact is a lot like adding security to an application
after it's been developed, instead of addressing security as part of the
application development process.




On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 8:02 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com>wrote:

> Tom Metro wrote:
>
>> I think much of the reset ends up being carefully developed in-house
>> configurations that haven't been shared back with the community.
>>
>
> That's because a HA configuration is unique to the services and
> applications it's wrapped around. I can share how I implemented a given HA
> cluster in general terms but the specifics won't do you any good. You can't
> pick up my config and drop it onto your cluster and expect it to work
> because it won't.
>
> Except when it will. That's what AWS and similar services do. But they do
> it not with service groups and resources but with entire virtual machines.
> Very nifty, actually, and very enticing to an organization that wants lots
> of computing power for little money. Of course none of these are actually
> highly available services, a little fact that gets neglected when the bean
> counters look at costs. But, hey, you get what you pay for.
>
> --
> Rich P.
>
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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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