With our secondary datacenter racked, provisioned, and ready to switch on, I blocked out this coming week to finalize things and make a few last minute enhancements.
During the past 6 years, we have managed to build a stable infrastructure that we're generally happy with. But there's always room for improvement, and we're starting to feel the pain of managing dozens of hosts. As someone who actively works with open source, I've learned how rewarding it is to work with people smarter than myself to solve interesting problems. So, I put the word out to some of the smartest people I know, and got a great response!
Today, we met for the first time and went over some of our main objectives for the coming week:
- Refine and automate our OS build and install process
- Build a test lab and refine our new load-balanced firewall configuration
- Automate service provisioning with some kind of messaging system
Scot, Josh, and Eric all brought a lot to the table. After just a few hours, we had a full test environment, and ideas were flying. Between Josh and Scot, we're just about ready to rock on the test environment. And while I had my heart set on basing a provisioning system around writing provisioning utilities triggered by the spread toolkit , Eric was aware of cfengine , which appears to have done a lot more of the heavy lifting.
We're also trading ideas in #pajunas at freenode. I'm grateful for all of the participation we've gotten so far. The output is always greater than the sum of its parts, and it's so much fun to have people to talk to.
Thanks everyone!
