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The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

letsencrypt.org

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Re: The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

#11

Post by castillar76 »

sgt wrote: post #3

I'm guessing someone out there's thinking: Why aren't they hosting in the cloud? The cloud being either Amazon or Azure. Surely nothing else exists. Is it really possible to host your own PHYSICAL machine? Does that count as the cloud?!

First, this made me giggle because I run into that attitude all the time. "You're hosting things on a SERVER? Why would anyone do THAT? Heck, you should be putting everything in serverless and avoiding even the vague possibility that you would have to touch anything so degrading and low-class as an operating system. Systems administration? Who does that?"

In all seriousness, however, the decision (likely) has very little to do with that. They're most likely not hosting in the cloud because the current CA/Browser Forum rules around the operation of public CAs effectively don't permit cloud hosting. That's a work in progress, but for the time being, the actual CA infrastructure can't be hosted in the cloud due to security and auditability requirements.

Re: The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

#12

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

StreamBright wrote: post #2

>> We currently use MariaDB, with the InnoDB database engine. It is kind of funny how long InnoDB was the most reliable storage engine. I am not sure if MyISAM is still trying to catch up, it used to be much worse than InnoDB. With the emergence of RocksDB there are multiple options today.

The only thing I ever used MyISAM tables for was for storing blobs and full-text search on documents. If your data is mostly read only then it's a decent option out of the box. But if you do even mildly frequent updates then you'll quickly run into problems with the table level locking instead of the row level locking offered by InnoDB

Re: The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

#13

Post by speedgoose »

sgt wrote: post #3

I'm guessing someone out there's thinking: Why aren't they hosting in the cloud? The cloud being either Amazon or Azure. Surely nothing else exists. Is it really possible to host your own PHYSICAL machine? Does that count as the cloud?!

Yes it's still possible to put your own physical machines in a datacentre.

For example : https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/dedirack/

I'm not sure you can say it's the cloud though.

They are not hosting their database in the cloud like Amazon or Azure because no cloud provider offers such high performances at a comparable price. Actually I'm not even sure you can get a cloud VM with that many IOs, if you don't mind the pricing.

Re: The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

#14

Post by anewaccount2021 »

multifascia wrote: post #4

As someone unfamiliar with db management, is it really less operational overhead to have to physically scale your hardware than using a distributed option with more elastic scalability capabilities?

As stated in the post, there are read replicas. Assuming their workload is primarily reads, this buys them a decent amount of redundancy.

Re: The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

#15

Post by tanelpoder »

multifascia wrote: post #4

As someone unfamiliar with db management, is it really less operational overhead to have to physically scale your hardware than using a distributed option with more elastic scalability capabilities?

Also worth noting that scalability != efficiency. With enough NVMe drives, a single server can do millions of IOPS and scan data at over 100 GB/s. A single PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD on my machine can do large I/Os at 6.8 GB/s rate, so 16 of them (with 4 x quad SSD adapter cards) in a 2-socket EPYC machine can do over 100 GB/s.

You may need clusters, duplicated systems, replication, etc for resiliency reasons of course, but a single modern machine with lots of memory channels per CPU and PCIe 4.0 can achieve ridiculous throughput...

edit: Here's an example of doing 11M IOPS with 10x Samsung Pro 980 PCIe 4.0 SSDs (it's from an upcoming blog entry):

https://twitter.com/TanelPoder/status/1352329243070504964

Re: The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

#16

Post by speedgoose »

multifascia wrote: post #4

As someone unfamiliar with db management, is it really less operational overhead to have to physically scale your hardware than using a distributed option with more elastic scalability capabilities?

They may rely on the ACID properties of their database. Which makes everything simpler, easier, and safer.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-acid.html

Re: The database servers powering Let's Encrypt

#17

Post by lykr0n »

cbg0 wrote: post #10

Unless I misunderstood something, it seems they have a single primary that handles read+write and multiple read replicas for it. It shouldn't be too difficult given the current use of MariaDB to start using something like Galera to create a multi-master cluster and improve redundancy of the service, unless there are some non-obvious reasons why they wouldn't be doing this. I think I also see redundant PSUs, would be…

That's still a very common pattern if you need maximum performance, and can tolerate small periods of downtime. When designing systems, you have to accept some drawbacks. You can forgo a clustered database if you have a strong on call schedule, and redundancy built in to other parts of your infrastructure.

Galera is great, but you lose some functionality with transactions and locking that could be a deal breaker. And up until MySQL 8, there were some fairly significant barriers to automation and clustering that could be a turn off for some people.

Everything has it's pros and cons.

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