Deploying large scale web applications

Presentation for undergraduate Information Science students enrolled in a Storage and Retrieval course.

More from me about business and technology.

1. DEPLOYING LARGE SCALE WEB APPLICATIONS Joël Cox joelcox.nl @joelcox
2. “The process of distributing, installing and activating software across a (non-empty) set of hosts.”
3. CASE 1
4. CASE 1
5. • Dependencies across multiple apps • No clear package manager aka • This was early 2000s THE PROBLEM $ sudo get-apt install apache2
6. THE SOLUTION • Write your own! • Why no open source solution? • Not available at the time • Not written in Perl/PHP • Support for Linux and FreeBSD
7. DIST • Central software repository • Mirrored across data centers • Mostly open source projects with special sauce
8. YINST • Install packages • Create packages, which can be send to dist • Easy configuration $ yinst set yapache.port=80
9. IGOR • How about configuration? • Environments • Clusters • Roles
10. POGO • So how do we run this on thousands of machines (and keep things live)? • Mass SSH tool • Constraint limited execution
11. TIE IT TOGETHER • Everything under version control, thus transactional • Managing thousands of deploys a day $ pogo run "yinst restore -igor -igor_tag 2011-11-14a" -I @east.frontend
12. CASE 2
13. THE PROBLEM • “Thousands” of servers • Deploy in short period of time
14. PREVIOUS SITUATION • One (git) deployment server • Every nth servers requires one additional deployment server for a given t
15. THE NUMBERS • Between 500MB and 1GB packages • “Thousands” of servers • About 1TB per deploy (guesstimate) • From 15 minutes to 12 seconds* * early 2010
16. MURDER • BitTorrent protocol • Open source packages as basis • Decentralized apart from the tracker • Capped gigabit connections
17. WHY BITTORRENT • Chunking and decentralization Peer Regular BitTorrent Insert cool data transfer animation here
18. OPTIMIZATIONS • One parent, one child • Timeouts • No encryption • Transfer in-memory (!) • No DHT
19. TIE IT TOGETHER • Capistrano as SSH interface • Tracker and seeder in each data centre $ cap murder:start_tracker $ cap murder:create_torrent tag="Deploy1" files_path="~/files" $ cap murder:start_seeding tag="Deploy1" $ cap murder:peer tag="Deploy1" destination_path="/tmp"
20. FUTURE (OUR!) CHALLENGES • Scale even bigger (storage, database) • Continuous integration & deployment • Automated testing • All code is deployed to production
21. THANKS TO • Raymund Ramos (@ram7os) Service Engineer at Yahoo! • Larry Gadea (@lg) Infrastructure Engineer at Twitter
22. START TINKERING • Yahoo’s Pogo https://github.com/ytoolshed/pogo • Twitter’s Murder https://github.com/lg/murder
23. THANKS FOR LISTENING! Questions?