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Highly Available Block Storage

digitalocean.com

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Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#43
I have been asking for non-SSD on DO for a long time now. My heart jumped when I saw the HN title, only to be dashed on the rocks.

What are us data nerds supposed to do? We want to take 10 terabytes, run a batch process on it, keep the 20TB, then continue with about 5GB of working data until the next month's terabyte comes in, then we want to batch through the 21TB. Right now the price slider doesn't even go up to 21TB, and clicking on the "need more storage button" doesn't go anywhere, but I'm assuming it would be $2100 / month which is more than 3x as expensive than vanilla S3.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#44
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ceph is not block storage -- ceph is object storage

It's actually both, and a file system.

Oh I guess I thought ceph was all about eventual consistency. I didn't know it was strongly consistent like what I expect from block storage.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#45

Reminder that just a few weeks ago DigitalOcean rolled over on one of their customers and took down 38,000 websites after receiving a claim of infringement from the NRA against a parody site hosted on surge.sh: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/nra-complaint-takes-down-38...

Reminder that you have to act on abuse notifications sharpish. You're providing a service, it's on you if you ignore abuse notifies.

"We received notice on behalf of a trademark holder that a customer of DigitalOcean was hosting infringing content on our network. DigitalOcean immediately notified our customer of the infringement, and the customer was given a five day period to resolve the issue. The infringing content was not removed within the specified period even though several notifications were issued. Per DigitalOcean’s terms of service, a final reminder was issued to our customer and, when no action was taken, access to the content was disabled. The infringing content was subsequently removed by the customer and all services were restored in less than two hours."

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#47

I have been asking for non-SSD on DO for a long time now. My heart jumped when I saw the HN title, only to be dashed on the rocks. What are us data nerds supposed to do? We want to take 10 terabytes, run a batch process on it, keep the 20TB, then continue with about 5GB of working data until the next month's terabyte comes in, then we want to batch through the 21TB. Right now the price slider doesn't even go up to 21…

At Bytemark we've done network as standard since 2012, so we can do 100GB of higher-capacity storage for £2/month, and all discs are expandible / migrateable online: bigv.io/prices

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#48
post #37
post #18

This helps me with a nicer deployment setup. I was always keen on 'rebuild from scratch' rather than 'update stuff and hope you're idempotent and have captured all changes' but transitory data was always the problem. Now I can start building a new updated droplet and the only downtime will be that needed to detach and reattach the block storage containing the db etc. Anyone see a flaw in this? (I know there are other…

> Anyone see a flaw in this? Perhaps not a flaw, but some issues with your setup are implied. If you're rebuilding from scratch because you're not sure that you can update things, then you're probably in need of a configuration management tool (I'm a big fan of saltstack[1], mostly because I don't like Ruby or DSL's, but there's lots of options out there[2]) If you're worried you're going to lose transitory data, it…

I tend to avoid those config management tools other than for basic bootstrapping exactly because while you can use those too to recreate from scratch, when you don't do that, you leave the door open for undocumented, unknown state, since most of them basically take a system in an unknown-but-hopefully-mostly-consistent state and try to bring them to a known state.

But they'll only be in a known state in that case if your setup is extremely comprehensive.

In practice I've seen too many config management tools where long running servers have ended up in unknown states because changes have been applied, and subsequently changes have either been made outside of the toolchain, or changes have been done to the config in ways that doesn't let the tool know what has changed, or the tools simply doesn't have a way of comparing machine states without comprehensively enumerating everything on the server (e.g. people running Ansible playbooks that adds X, subsequently removing the requirement X from the playbook, and going about without considering whether or not X will interact with Y which they've added later).

As a result, I see rebuilding from scratch as largely orthogonal to whether or not you use a configuration management tool or e.g. build VM images that you replace wholesale, or whatever you do: You should rebuild from scratch regularly, as coupled with a test-suite it's the only realistic way of knowing whether or not you've left anything out of your build process.

My biggest caveat with config management systems is that they tend to end up encouraging live changes to a setup, instead of a build-test-deploy cycle. Sometimes that's necessary, but to me that's a last resort.

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