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Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

dropbox.tech

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Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#121

Post by mholt »

atonse wrote: post #118
mholt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a great choice for a general purpose proxy. (That's kind of the point.)

But they mentioned that they wanted to use C++ instead of go to get even that extra performance out. I use Caddy a lot and it's perfectly fine for my scale, but at dropbox's scale, maybe go wouldn't be enough for the ingress part?

I just lament the increasing deployments of programs written in memory-unsafe languages to the edge, in general.

I am more curious what makes the author think Caddy "might not be the best choice for a general purpose ingress/egress proxy" (there were no other qualifications to that statement, but no evidence to support it either).

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#122

Post by move-on-by »

e40 wrote: post #40

Also note that we’ll cover the open source version of the Nginx, not its commercial version with additional features. It always kills me when very successful companies don't buy software from other companies. I remember being at a lunch with a prospective client that really loved our technology. About 1/2 way through, he said he really would love to purchase our software, but the CEO doesn't allow them to use anythin…

Just speculation, but there are motives to not use the closed source version beyond purely profits driven point of view. One of the prime benefits of OSS is that you have the power to change it whenever necessary. If something is breaking bad- you might not have the luxury of waiting on support to track down and fix your problem. If you don’t need the features of the paid version- then using the paid version is actually limiting your options.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#123

Post by apexalpha »

e40 wrote: post #40

Also note that we’ll cover the open source version of the Nginx, not its commercial version with additional features. It always kills me when very successful companies don't buy software from other companies. I remember being at a lunch with a prospective client that really loved our technology. About 1/2 way through, he said he really would love to purchase our software, but the CEO doesn't allow them to use anythin…

In my company thousands of CentOS servers were running, we still had the support license though.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#124

Post by chii »

pjmlp wrote: post #100
mehrdada wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not infer that from the OP’s comment, but in any case, I don’t know the specifics of their arrangement or whether they had been a commercial customer or not. Last time I checked Nginx had been doing fine selling itself for half a billion. But more abstractly, I don’t actually agree with that sentiment. I see more of a responsibility to give back in the form of patches and collaboration than throwing $ at the pr…

All fine and dandy, except that those patches and collaboration don't pay bills.

> patches and collaboration don't pay bills.

implying that just because your open source project is being used, that it is entitled to fund the bills of the project maintainers.

I think patches and contributions are a form of bill paying.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#125

Post by nielsole »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #95

Can somebody speak to why dynamic upstreams included in a file paired with `sudo service nginx reload` for prod deploys stopped scaling?

Nginx configuration is bound to its workers. When you reload nginx new workers are created(and start responding to new connections) and the old ones are drained. The draining finishes when the last connection is finished or a timeout is reached. In OSS nginx every upstream change requires a configuration reload. If you have lots of upstream changes and don't want to terminate connections prematurely, this can quickly require lots of RAM as you have many workers. Stock nginx worker is around 150Mb, but issues with openresty integration(they mention lua usage) can bloat this to > 1GB.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#126

Post by chii »

dragonwriter wrote: post #82
holografix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also rubbed me the wrong way. As an individual I think that shows selfish and opportunistic behaviour and it raises a red flag about that organisation in my mind. However, for profit companies are not here to do what’s “correct” they’re here to make money for its investors. If I had decision making abilities at Nginx I’d be conducting a comprehensive review of the free OSS offering and redacting the features and…

> If you have an enterprise, paid version of your OSS product it has to be impossible for an enterprise to use it for free. Why? Most enterprises, especially ones that aren't tech firms, are going to shell out for enterprise support even if there are no additional features. Crippling the community version doesn't necessarily help enterprise sales, it can reduce overall mindshare reducing enterprise traction or, worse…

> shell out for enterprise support even if there are no additional features.

i don't feel this to be true.

Also, an enterprise that's large would want some features that are irrelevant to a small shop. For example, single-sign-on integration with various providers.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#127

Post by mehrdada »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #112
gitgud wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think that monetisation of open-source goes against the consumer of the OSS in practically all cases. - Open-Core::: Features are not added to core, as they want people to upgrade. - Consulting::: Ease of use is ignored, as if it's too easy people won't need consultants. - Sponsoring Goals::: Software is almost held at ransom, until goals are reached. The best way to help open-source software is to donat…

Do you have an example of sponsorship goals actively gating software development? I haven’t seen this one. “I’m not patching this zero day until I get to $1,000,000!”

Isn't that what RHEL is, in different words obviously.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#128

Post by [deleted] »

e40 wrote: post #40

Also note that we’ll cover the open source version of the Nginx, not its commercial version with additional features. It always kills me when very successful companies don't buy software from other companies. I remember being at a lunch with a prospective client that really loved our technology. About 1/2 way through, he said he really would love to purchase our software, but the CEO doesn't allow them to use anythin…

[deleted]

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#129

Post by PopeDotNinja »

mehrdada wrote: post #127
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of sponsorship goals actively gating software development? I haven’t seen this one. “I’m not patching this zero day until I get to $1,000,000!”

Isn't that what RHEL is, in different words obviously.

I suppose, but you know you’re what you’re buying when you sign up for RedHat. I was trying to imagine a scenario where free OSS project does that, like Kubernetes or React.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#130

Post by Slartie »

pjmlp wrote: post #114
ram_rar wrote: post #68

I feel so old now. There was a time, when I used to discuss with senior engineers @ Yahoo! to use NginX over Apache. Nginx was the hot thing, popularizing C10k [1]. Now in my current team, I have junior devs in my team pushing for Envoy over HAProxy/Nginx setup. Is this trend happening primarily because devs are pushing for GRPC over REST? What benefits does Envoy offer over Nginx, if you're still a REST based servic…

Yep, gRPC is the new toy for distributed computing, after everyone realised that DCOM, CORBA, RMI, Remoting actually made sense instead of parsing XML and JSON text formats all the time.

I had to chuckle as well when I read that article and the part about gRPC. Seems like the pendulum is swinging into the other direction again - back to where we've already been ten or twenty years ago. New name of course, but same concepts.

One really starts to feel old at such occasions.

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