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Abstract: 

It's easy to set up a single GNU/Linux server, but there's no obvious way to take those same skills and build functional clusters. If you want to do that, you need a whole new class of tools. At Four Kitchens, we've done the hard work: we maintain an in-office lab to develop and apply cluster-level integration and management techniques to the challenging problems we encounter managing our clients' infrastructure. We'd like to show you what we've learned in our lab and in the field.

Presenters: 

David Strauss

It's easy to set up a single GNU/Linux server, but there's no obvious way to take those same skills and build functional clusters. If you want to build and maintain clusters while avoiding the pitfalls of one-by-one server management, you need a whole new class of tools. Unfortunately, documentation for choosing, deploying, and integrating these tools is sparse.

At Four Kitchens, we've done the hard work: we maintain an in-office lab to develop and apply cluster-level integration and management techniques to the challenging problems we encounter managing our clients' infrastructure.

This session will focus on taking a set of servers with little more than operating systems and SSH and building a cluster you can scale, monitor, and maintain.

Session attendees should be familiar with single-server Linux package management and configuration.

Learn how to:

  • Run the latest stable versions of MySQL 5.0 and PHP 5.2 on CentOS 5
  • Install APC and memcached
  • Deploy your code (core, modules, etc.) to sets of servers from a version control system (Bazaar/Subversion and Capistrano)
  • Maintain consistent configurations and automate deployments (bcfg2)
  • Monitor servers for load and functionality (Nagios)
  • Graph historical system metrics (Munin)
  • Automate fail-over (Heartbeat 2)

And we'll do it all with easy-to-update yum repositories and no manual compilation or installation.

I would like feedback from prospective attendees on the most important items above. It's unlikely I'll be able to give comprehensive coverage to all of them.

Note: The actual tools used to implement the items above may change. We probably won't use all the same tools by the time Drupalcon comes around.

2 Comments

I am especially interested to hear how you deal with versioning with respect to databases. With all the drupal sites I have floating around, many are different svn revisions and various drupal versions. It would be all to easy to update to a code base that was incompatible with the database version. I'd like to hear how you deal w/ this?