There is this interesting point where you realize that you own a data center.
My data center doesn’t look like that beautiful server farm in the picture, but I do have one.
I have multiple servers, each with reasonable amounts of memory. I have independent nodes, capable of performing as ceph nodes and as docker nodes.
Which took me to a step up from K8S.
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People get very upset when they go to visit Amazon, Netflix, or just their favorite gun blog and the site is down.
This happens when a site is not configured with high availability in mind.
The gist is that we do not want to have a single point of failure, anywhere in the system.
To take a simple example, you have purchased a full network connection to your local office. This means that there is no shared IP address. You have a full /24 (255) IP addresses to work with.
This means that there is a wire that comes into your office from your provider. This attaches to a router. The router attaches to a switch. Servers connect to the server room switch which connects to the office switch.
All good.
You are running a Windows Server on bare metal with a 3 TB drive.
Now we start to analyze failure points. What if that cable is cut?
This happened to a military installation in the 90s. They had two cables coming to the site. There was one from the south gate and another from the north gate. If one cable was cut, all the traffic could be carried by the other cable.
This was great, except that somebody wasn’t thinking when they ran the last 50 feet into the building. They ran both cables through the same conduit. And when there was some street work a year or so later, the conduit was cut, severing both cables.
The site went down.
I’ve been deep into a learning curve for the last couple of months, broken by required trips to see dad before he passes.
The issue at hand is that I need to reduce our infrastructure costs. They are out of hand.
My original thought, a couple of years ago, was to move to K8S. With K8S, I would be able to deploy sites and supporting architecture with ease. One control file to rule them all.
This mostly works. I have a Helm deployment for each of the standard types of sites I deploy. Which works well for me.
The problem is how people build containers.
My old method of building out a system was to create a configuration file for an HTTP/HTTPS server that then served individual websites. I would put this on a stable OS. We would then do a major OS upgrade every four years on an OS that had a 6-year support tail for LTS releases. (Long-Term Support)
This doesn’t work for the new class of developers and software deployments.
Containers are the current answer to all our infrastructure ills.