I’m the lead systems administrator at Widemile and run operations here. Sometimes I do other things, but operations is most interesting. My linkedin profile may give you an idea of where I’m coming from, but it misses all those late nights working with OSS because I enjoy it. I usually blog on my own site, but it often serves more as a technical journal than what we are up to at Widemile, which will be the differentiator. As a rule, I’m not a developer. Certain facts may convince you otherwise, but I try to stay out of our product. You’ll start to hear from Peter Crossley , our lead software architect, soon enough. Perhaps some other developers after that. I’ll christen this blog with a round-up of how we’re building our infrastructure at Widemile.
Most recently I’ve been in heavy development on Chef and Ohai. We’ve been using puppet for about a year and a half now. Check out my Infrastructure Engineering slide deck for where we were with that a few months ago. I’ve been happy with it except for a few issues which ended up being mostly major architectural changes to fix. Adam at Opscode has a good post entitled 9 things to like about Chef, that outlines some of these difference. There’s a lot of e-drama around Opscode’s decision to write a new product rather than usher changes into puppet. I won’t touch that other than to say that we had problems with puppet that chef fixes.
Almost all of our servers are in configuration management. Which means that no one-off work is done on the production servers so that all changes are self-documenting. Granted, we’re a small shop and sometimes I’ll do minor debugging on a production server, but any changes do end up in CM.
Our servers are almost all kvm guests under libvirt running on Dell blades. There’s some information about how we got here in a slidedeck I made for GSLUG entitled Virtual Infrastructure. Apparently using kvm in production isn’t all that heard of, but since we’re a small shop we’re able to leverage new technology very quickly to make the best of it. With the use of vmbuilder, libvirt, kvm and capistrano, we build out new nodes in a matter of minutes. More importantly, it’s just a couple commands.
Once Chef is intergrated with the libvirt API we expect to be able to further simplify our deployment. The idea behing is that it will be a ghetto version of Solo, which EY built using Chef. Eventually we’ll pull out capistrano. While it’s nice for interacting with multiple machines at once, it really was written for a different purpose than what we use it for. There will be replacement functionality in Chef shortly.