[Outages-discussion] Avoiding puppet/cfengine as the next SPOF

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Jan 25, 2014, at 20:38 , George William Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> Even with one-few-many, you have test failures, config problems that take longer than test time to fully manifest, n^2 and n! Scaling for some disturbance patterns, etc.
> 
> Nothing is perfect...

What he said.

Anyone who thinks you can manage a "planetary scale" (as we liked to say at Akamai) deployment without hitting a few hiccoughs is deluding themselves. As with pretty much everything, there is no single solution, just strategies to lower the risk. "One-few-many" is a strategy, and a good one, but not a solution.

However, I would still much rather be in the regime of "it is my fault we went down", than "someone else can take us down". Having recently transitioned from A to B, I feel this difference quite acutely and can tell you from personal experience, A is WAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than B.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick


> On Jan 25, 2014, at 4:48 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> 
>> [ moved to -discuss ]
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Conrad Heiney" <conrad at fringehead.org>
>> 
>>> Centralized configuration is necessary. It is also the new SPOF.
>> 
>> I would assert that if it is, you're not driving it correctly. 
>> 
>> Sure, you need it on things as big as the Googleplex.  But that doesn't mean
>> that you can't use Tom Limoncelli's celebrated "one, few, many, all" 
>> staged deployment approach, when setting up pushes.
>> 
>> In fact, it's *easier*, since you know that they'll all get the same 
>> configuration.
>> 
>> You have to be careful about interdependencies, of course, but that --
>> again -- is something computers are pretty good at.  :-)
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> -- jra
>> -- 
>> Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
>> Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
>> Ashworth & Associates       http://www.bcp38.info          2000 Land Rover DII
>> St Petersburg FL USA      BCP38: Ask For It By Name!           +1 727 647 1274
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