Autoscaling with Capistrano, NFS and Runit

https://bugsnag.com/blog/autoscaling-capistrano-nfs-runit

by loopj • 12 years ago

8 9 12 years ago

bugsnag.com

justizin• 12 years ago

"NFS lets you share a directory between multiple servers (think of it as Dropbox for servers)."

Oy vey. ;)

panhandlr2• 12 years ago

More like, "Dropbox is like NFS for desktops"

panhandlr2• 12 years ago

Good luck with those stale NFS file handles...

mbreese2• 12 years ago

From the article:

NFS lets you share a directory between multiple servers (think of it as Dropbox for servers).

So, ignoring that NFS is nothing like Dropbox, there's nothing wrong per se with using NFS on a cloud setup for shared storage, this setup assumes that your NFS server will always be up. For anyone who has worked with NFS servers, you'll know that this isn't always the case. (Who here has lost a day when your NFS mounted home directory won't load?)

And you don't want to deal with a down NFS server when you're trying to auto-scale. Somewhere you'll always have a single point of failure, but I've always tried to make NFS not be it.

ChrisSlx• 12 years ago

NFS is a single point of failure. If something goes wrong on your NFS host, you'll break your entire cluster. That obvious oversight combined with calling it "Dropbox for servers" makes me think that whoever designed this doesn't understand NFS.

mtanski• 12 years ago

You're probably better if using Cephfs or Lustre then NFS. Linearly scalable, no SPOF (single point of failure).

dpe82• 12 years ago

AFS is quite well suited for this use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System

lwhalen• 12 years ago

Well hold on with the NFS hate everyone. I worked for a (very large, very deep-pocketed) web hosting company around 10 years ago, and they used NFS to deploy their software, configs (this was just before Puppet started getting popular), and user data. This worked VERY well. Granted, they were running on some pretty heavy iron (a couple dozen NetApp filers, all clustered 11 ways to Sunday) to make sure that the NFS facilities stayed up, but If You Know What You're Doing(tm) and err on the 'fast' and 'good' sides of the 'fast, cheap, and good - pick two' aphorism, NFS is quite useful.

mbreese2• 12 years ago

Exactly - you were working with a well engineered system that could handle failover. Simply installing an NFS server on an Ubuntu VM isn't going to come close to the reliability that you'd want for this job.

Autoscaling with Capistrano, NFS and Runit

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