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Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

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151–160 of 237 posts

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#151
I would differ on a small point. For SOHO usage, I think that docker compose is perfectly viable and often simplifies backup, migration and moving to a new server. Just my own take on this. A lot of apps really only need one instance with a good backup strategy and not hot failover instances and can handle an hour of down time once a year or two as needed, which I rarely experience.

As mentioned in the article, it also serves as a decent set of instructions, assuming the actual dockerfile(s) for the services and dependencies are broadly available. You can swap out the compose instance of PostgreSQL for your dedicated server with a new account/db, relatively easily. Similar for other non-app centered services (redis, rabbitmq, etc). You can go all in, or partly in and in any case it does serve as self-documenting to a large degree.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes has unquestionably been a game changer. If you look at most enterprises today you will see it deployed everywhere. And most of the complexity has been abstracted away by the cloud providers so all you're left with is a system that can handle all manner of different applications and deployment scenarios in a consistent way.

> Kubernetes has unquestionably been a game changer. > If you look at most enterprises today you will see it deployed everywhere. This doesn't mean it's a game changer. It just means it has a big cargo-cult and people keep using it regardless of whether they need it. > most of the complexity has been abstracted away by the cloud providers The abstractions that people add make things more complex, not less. Unless of…

You're probably going to be downvoted to oblivion but I 100% agree with you. It seems like they tried to remove all the complexity, and just made new complexity.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#153

"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.

I wouldn't call it abuse of trust but it's a bad idea to do a migration or any operation that can fail and cause downtime without warning the clients. Come Monday and no servers are online, what do you say, "oops, I tried to change something that didn't work"? that is fine only if they knew there was a migration over the weekend. On my end this situation would fireable offense or close to it.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#154

"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.

What!? Changing implementation details is not “abusing trust”. Where would you even draw the line with this attitude!? Should I be informing my customers whenever I update the version of left-pad I have installed!?

It’s generally about the probability of issues occurring and the expected magnitude of those potential issues. For most people and setups, moving the infrastructure to a new operating system would score about as highly as possible in both of those metrics.

As has been said, it varies case-by-case, and the OP believes they have a relationship with their client such that they didn’t need to provide notice for this, and they’re probably right. But most people doing this would send out a “maintenance is occurring on this date and some downtime may occur” email.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#155
post #79

I use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all for fun, learning, and profit(the first two). At the very least it is nice to make acquaintance with at least one BSD because it will probably expand your knowledge on Linux in ways you wont be able to anticipate. For example, FreeBSD got me into kernel development, full system debugging, network stack development, driver development, and understanding how the whole kit f…

Yeah, you know, a lot of us talk about FreeBSD being great because you aren't surprised by design choices—it mostly just makes sense.

But I don't think we talk enough about the joy of not being surprised by updates. I'm about to do an upgrade from 13.2 to 14.1 this weekend and I am very confident that I won't have to worry about configuring a new audio subsystem, changing all my startup scripts to work with a new service manager paradigm, or half my programs suddenly being slow because they're some new quasi-container package format.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am stuck in the btrfs-is-buggy mindset precisely because it managed to lose my root partition on a single disk machine. It might also have raid problems, but not exclusively.

Me too. Repeatedly, at least once a year, on 3 different machines. The cause? Filling up the filesystem. Why? Because of OS snapshots. (Aside: why can they fill it? Because it doesn't give a straight answer to `df -h`. Why not? Because of snapshots.)

That happened recently? A few years ago they added a reserved area used for emergency purposes that should solve situations like that. Can't say I've run into these problems, although I don't tend to run btrfs very heavily because performance becomes unacceptable long before that due to CoW.

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-filesystem.html

(Look for "GlobalReserve")

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook runs their entire stack using Btrfs [0]. I would encourage anyone who is stuck in the "oh btrfs is so buggy and loses data" mindset (not helped by articles like this [1] that play off btrfs as some half-baked contraption, when it's really btrfs raid that needs a LOT more time to bake) to look into things and realize that large companies (OpenSuse, Redhat, Faceboook) have poured a lot of time to get it to wor…

I use btrfs a lot but I'm not sure if I'd use it for production servers. The I/O bandwidth is just a lot lower and I get weird latency problems on desktop Linux when BTRFS is very busy that I don't get on other file systems. Then again, I probably wouldn't use ZFS for anything but a NAS setup either.

The default is to coalesce trim requests into large batches and issue them once per minute or so. Most other filesystems don't use online trim. This can cause latency spikes. If you'll ever decide to try it out again, try disabling online trim.

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Trim.html

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hard to know the timeline with his data loss, but I am assuming it was a long time ago. XFS is originally from SGI Irix and was designed to run on higher end hardware. SGI donated it to Linux in 1999 and it carried a lot of its assumptions over. For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that…

Facebook runs their entire stack using Btrfs [0]. I would encourage anyone who is stuck in the "oh btrfs is so buggy and loses data" mindset (not helped by articles like this [1] that play off btrfs as some half-baked contraption, when it's really btrfs raid that needs a LOT more time to bake) to look into things and realize that large companies (OpenSuse, Redhat, Faceboook) have poured a lot of time to get it to wor…

Last time they talked about it (that I know of -- when Fedora was contemplating using btrfs and asked Chris Mason et al for their opinion), FB were running databases on xfs and were looking for ways to place them on raw disks for maximum performance. So not the entire stack.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#159
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you've moved to AWS which is an expensive cloud. You could have easily run Kubernetes on your virtualised servers.

Define easily?

Still requires SRE but alot easier than it used to be: https://www.talos.dev/v1.8/

Also, k3s. https://k3s.io/

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kubernetes has unquestionably been a game changer. > If you look at most enterprises today you will see it deployed everywhere. This doesn't mean it's a game changer. It just means it has a big cargo-cult and people keep using it regardless of whether they need it. > most of the complexity has been abstracted away by the cloud providers The abstractions that people add make things more complex, not less. Unless of…

You're probably going to be downvoted to oblivion but I 100% agree with you. It seems like they tried to remove all the complexity, and just made new complexity.

Modern systems are complex generally. If it's not Kubernetes with YAML files, it's a bunch of servers in VMware which is own ball of wax followed by extensive Ansible/Puppet/Chef setup and SREs who keeping entire architecture in their head since they don't have time to write it down.

Obviously, there is exact opposite with stuff like fly.io but they can be extremely constraining.

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