Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub's Metal Cloud

githubengineering.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 83 posts

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#61

Post by q3k »

wtbob wrote: post #50
ptype wrote: post #49

Why would a company like GitHub choose Ubuntu over Debian? The LTS policy?

I too would be interested in the answer. From my perspective, Debian is the server Linux distro par excellence , and in my experience the folks who choose Ubuntu have been devs who don't actually use Linux (e.g., the sorts who develop on a Mac or in a VM rather than on a personal Linux system). It's not really fair to Ubuntu, which is decent enough in its own way, but I tend to consider the choice of Ubuntu to be a b…

Newer packages, sane LTS policy, easier to get non-free firmware/drivers going (as in, the default CD comes with them), seemingly more support from third parties.

They're both pretty awful due to their automagic(al tendency to break down in mysterious ways), but if I have to choose, I'll go with Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: My main box runs Gentoo and I own no Mac machines, if that changes anything in your vision of Ubuntu users.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#62

Post by q3k »

castell wrote: post #21

The Hubot workflow sounds interesting. It seems more and more DevOps prefer it. Has someone first hand experience with such Hubot usage? Do you prefer such commands or would you want to write more informal short sentences?

Semi-off-topic, but I am genuinely scared by giving a chat bot full root access to your infrastructure. This just doesn't seem like a mature enough, AAA-enabled channel. Especially when there's a third party (HipChat/Slack/...) involved.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#63

Post by grandalf »

This is pretty cool but is there really that much benefit to doing this? What size IT staff do the savings justify? Does that change if you use Amazon's market-driven options like spot pricing and capacity planning discounts?

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#64

Post by dmourati »

A_Beer_Clinked wrote: post #19

Can anybody with experience of using Openstack Ironic[1] in this space comment on advantages of rolling your own liek GitHub? [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic

A consultant from Ubuntu called Ironic a "still birth" and said its name was indicative of its fit with the rest of OpenStack. His team used MaaS which I gather serves most of the same purpose:

https://maas.ubuntu.com/

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#65

Post by Jgrubb »

avar wrote: post #56
wtbob wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too would be interested in the answer. From my perspective, Debian is the server Linux distro par excellence , and in my experience the folks who choose Ubuntu have been devs who don't actually use Linux (e.g., the sorts who develop on a Mac or in a VM rather than on a personal Linux system). It's not really fair to Ubuntu, which is decent enough in its own way, but I tend to consider the choice of Ubuntu to be a b…

Some choose it because Ubuntu, unlike Debian, has a guaranteed timely release cycle, and unlike Debian they have formalized LTS.

This is why I choose Ubuntu.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#66

Post by amalag »

Is this also done remotely by gPanel?

>Once we've gathered all the information we need about the machine, we enter configuring, where we assign a static IP address to the IPMI interface and tweak our BIOS settings. From there we move to firmware_upgrade where we update FCB, BMC, BIOS, RAID, and any other firmware we'd like to manage on the system.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#67

Post by zeveb »

q3k wrote: post #61
wtbob wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too would be interested in the answer. From my perspective, Debian is the server Linux distro par excellence , and in my experience the folks who choose Ubuntu have been devs who don't actually use Linux (e.g., the sorts who develop on a Mac or in a VM rather than on a personal Linux system). It's not really fair to Ubuntu, which is decent enough in its own way, but I tend to consider the choice of Ubuntu to be a b…

Newer packages, sane LTS policy, easier to get non-free firmware/drivers going (as in, the default CD comes with them), seemingly more support from third parties. They're both pretty awful due to their automagic(al tendency to break down in mysterious ways), but if I have to choose, I'll go with Ubuntu. Disclaimer: My main box runs Gentoo and I own no Mac machines, if that changes anything in your vision of Ubuntu us…

> Newer packages, sane LTS policy

Those two are in opposition: Debian (generally) has new-enough packages, but it's stable, which is what one wants on a server system. Meanwhile, Debian's LTS story is better than Ubuntu's: just upgrade, and know it will work.

> easier to get non-free firmware/drivers

But how often is that needed for server systems? And of course, there're the ethical & engineering issues with using proprietary software in the first place.

> seemingly more support from third parties

There is that, but if we all wanted more support from third parties, we'd have stuck with Windows, no?

> They're both pretty awful due to their automagic(al tendency to break down in mysterious ways)

I've not experienced that with Debian in a long time. I used to have issues with Ubuntu, but I don't think that they were generally all that bad. Better than what I used to experience with Macs and Windows back in the 90s, anyway.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#68

Post by scott_karana »

grandalf wrote: post #63

This is pretty cool but is there really that much benefit to doing this? What size IT staff do the savings justify? Does that change if you use Amazon's market-driven options like spot pricing and capacity planning discounts?

The equivalent of a M4.x10large running 24/7, which would cost $1814/month, costs about $400-$500/month lease from Dell or HP.

There are other costs, like cooling, power, peering, networking gear, colocation/building costs, having spare parts on hand, paying sysadmins, et cetera, that are going to vary based on your requirements and region.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#69

Post by FireBeyond »

SEJeff wrote: post #54
alpb wrote: post #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.

Vs just buying opengear console servers and something like conserver to get the actual text via serial like most large Unix environments (every job I've worked at) do. Then you can just scrape the text.

Right, this surprised me. They're doing IPMI, so why not SOL (Serial over LAN) to get the raw stream?

Actually, on second thoughts, I'm not surprised so much. I've read many threads on Supermicro IPMI and people's frustration with it (reliant on outdated Java, and hacked together wrappers over VNC) that make it seem like a deliberate choice to obfuscate things -just- enough to make other tools difficult.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#70

Post by FireBeyond »

amalag wrote: post #66

Is this also done remotely by gPanel? >Once we've gathered all the information we need about the machine, we enter configuring, where we assign a static IP address to the IPMI interface and tweak our BIOS settings. From there we move to firmware_upgrade where we update FCB, BMC, BIOS, RAID, and any other firmware we'd like to manage on the system.

In theory it should be if you have a tightly controlled hardware process (and in this case, Dell, who is used to selling servers configured to initially PXE boot, etc), and you have some 'expect/send' scripting in place.
Post reply on HN