In late 2013 we looked around the company and asked ourselves the questions any management team has to ask: what are we doing, where do we need to be, and what’s holding us back from getting there? Because Anchor had grown organically across many years, our internal procedures for infrastructure management were spread across a number of tools […]
Several months ago we talked about extending the functionality of Redis, the popular noSQL key-value datastore. Since then we’ve taken things a bit further and we think it’s worth sharing. The Customer needs to store a lot of data in Redis, a few hundred GB at last check, and growing. Redis’ single-threaded nature means it […]
Here at the Anchor Internet Laboratory we’ve been discussing ideas for new deployments of our VPS infrastructure. One that we’re excited about is the idea of “plug and play” hardware. Plug and play what? Deploying more hardware capacity takes time. It needs to be burn-in tested, tracked in the asset management system, installed, configured, and […]
We’ve been looking at Ceph recently, it’s basically a fault-tolerant distributed clustered filesystem. If it works, that’s like a nirvana for shared storage: you have many servers, each one pitches in a few disks, and the there’s a filesystem that sits on top that visible to all servers in the cluster. If a disk fails, […]
The HA binge continues, today we’re talking about high availability through clustering – providing a service with multiple, independent servers. This differs from the options we’ve discussed so far because it doesn’t involve Corosync and Pacemaker. We’ll still be using the term “clustering”, but it’s now applied high up at the application level. There’s no […]
Update from 2012-05-24: The Corosync devs have addressed this and a patch is in the pipeline. The effect is roughly as described below, to build the linked list by appending to the tail, and preferring an exact IP address match for bindnetaddr (which was intended all along but got lost along the way). Rejoicing all […]