GitHub's Metal Cloud
githubengineering.com
GitHub's Metal Cloud
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#2This seems wrong to me. This was the state of the art ~3 years ago. Now, I feel like all of the machines should be provisioned already with an OS, and a basic image, and a orchestration system like CoreOS / Mesos / Docker should specialize them.
IMHO, requiring hardware, or the entire machine should be exception, not the rule.
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#3This seems wrong to me. This was the state of the art ~3 years ago. Now, I feel like all of the machines should be provisioned already with an OS, and a basic image, and a orchestration system like CoreOS / Mesos / Docker should specialize them. IMHO, requiring hardware, or the entire machine should be exception, not the rule.
Wait, why? Are you advocating for the use of an abstraction layer where there isn't always a business case for using one?
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#4> We've hacked together a Ruby script that retrieves a console screenshot via IPMI and checks the color in the image to determine if we've hit a failure or not.
That's pretty funny yet sounds a lot familiar to many of us as every now and then we all do these sort of nasty hacks.
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#5> We've hacked together a Ruby script that retrieves a console screenshot via IPMI and checks the color in the image to determine if we've hit a failure or not. That's pretty funny yet sounds a lot familiar to many of us as every now and then we all do these sort of nasty hacks.
Also probably a lot better than to make MemTest86 do all sorts of network stuff.
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#6This seems wrong to me. This was the state of the art ~3 years ago. Now, I feel like all of the machines should be provisioned already with an OS, and a basic image, and a orchestration system like CoreOS / Mesos / Docker should specialize them. IMHO, requiring hardware, or the entire machine should be exception, not the rule.
Just because you use Containers/VMs for most of your apps doesn't mean that the lower levels don't need attention: installing OSes in the first place, hardware testing (both initially and to identify defects later), ...
And for important fileservers and databases you're going to run on specific hardware for a long time.
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#7This seems wrong to me. This was the state of the art ~3 years ago. Now, I feel like all of the machines should be provisioned already with an OS, and a basic image, and a orchestration system like CoreOS / Mesos / Docker should specialize them. IMHO, requiring hardware, or the entire machine should be exception, not the rule.
you realize the cloud runs on hardware right. machines don't magically come with everything installed and configured.
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#8This seems wrong to me. This was the state of the art ~3 years ago. Now, I feel like all of the machines should be provisioned already with an OS, and a basic image, and a orchestration system like CoreOS / Mesos / Docker should specialize them. IMHO, requiring hardware, or the entire machine should be exception, not the rule.
Even if you were going to run CoreOS or Mesos on the machine, you'd still manage it booting your specific image, which you can change, rather than trusting the pre-installed dell verion and managing that relationship.
Now there's probably some room for debate on whether these guys job should just be outsourced to Amazon, but github has some pretty good uptime and they seem to know what they're doing, thus they've probably already won that debate.
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#9This seems wrong to me. This was the state of the art ~3 years ago. Now, I feel like all of the machines should be provisioned already with an OS, and a basic image, and a orchestration system like CoreOS / Mesos / Docker should specialize them. IMHO, requiring hardware, or the entire machine should be exception, not the rule.
Sometimes you have a workload that really isn't a fit for virtualization/containers/whatever the latest Rails hotness is, at all, and you just need to throw a couple of cargo trailers of insanely massively-spec'd servers at the problem. In those cases, your 'old school' server provisioning toolkit had better be on-point.
It's easy to forget just how ridiculously powerful bare iron is these days. Go to Dell.com and see how much RAM you can cram into a U or three or four today in 2015. Or see how many IOPS a modern NetApp or Symmetrix (EMC) can push with 'flashcache' or million-dollar SSDs. It is ridiculous, and while a lot of those platforms are meant for 'building your own private cloud', etc, there's a non-trivial amount of workloads/projects where bare-iron is the best tool for the job.
Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud
#10> We've hacked together a Ruby script that retrieves a console screenshot via IPMI and checks the color in the image to determine if we've hit a failure or not. That's pretty funny yet sounds a lot familiar to many of us as every now and then we all do these sort of nasty hacks.
Yikes, having attended a computer vision conference last week, that sort of apporach is actually starting to sound reasonable and intelligent!