Deployment and DevOps

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
3 min read

Attendees

Matt Critchlow (UCSD)

Tim Marconi (UCSD)

Ron Stanonik (UCSD)

bess (Stanford)

David Chandek-Stark (Duke)

Jim Coble (Duke)

Steven Ng (Chinese Historical Society of Southern California)

aliciac (DCE)

Ian Lessing (UCSB)

Dermot Frost (Trinity College, Dublin)

Jimmy Tang (Trinity College, Dublin)

Glen Horton (University of Cincinnati)


Topics (some unanswered or not discussed):

Challenges of going from development to production?

Fedora?

Hardware specs relative to collection size and users?

How long will the migration/ingest process take?

For folks in production: what were easy, challenges, what does prod environment look like?

Streaming video?

How are people dealing with migrating fedora instances?

New Hydra Head: separate repository or new?


 

Questions:

Chef or Puppet or Ansible? Community using all three, can we organize or rally around this?

  • consider Avalon as a starting point

  • Campus IT or external hosts are nervous about granting access to run config, or have already made the decision of Chef/Puppet/Ansible.

  • Ideally Sufia/Hydramata might have Chef and Puppet scripts for deployment so adopters can choose

Single Machine or multi-machine deployment?

  • Stanford: load balanced with F5. Searchworks, generally shared Solr cluster and single Fedora instance that apps are connecting to. Trying to load balance as resources are available to do so.

  • UCSB: haproxy system in front of any sites. does load balancing + security wall

Slashdotted?

  • Stanford: Yes, crashed. spun up new instances of server and was able to keep up with traffic. Puppet helped significantly in this

  • UCSD: got on Reddited.

Monitoring Systems?

OS’s? CentOS, Scientific (Trinity)

  • CentOS repos are often out of date

  • Stanford: RHEL

  • UCSD: moving away from RHEL due to new Redhat university licensing

Server Configuration management?:

  • 50% of room already using. 100% moving towards/considering


 

Short Status Notes

Trinity College: A few months from going to production. distributed file systems

UCSB: Deploying in next few months. worried about deploying stable system that can keep up with dev. system that is performance tuned. Want staging to resemble production.


 

Stanford: How do we anticipate demand and sizing? GIS/Spatial data infrastrure brings new questions.

  • migrating huge amounts of content from SDR1

  • created positions for devops, could possibly share the job descriptions for others to reference

  • still struggling with what operations procedures should be

    • gotten much better w/ puppet

    • 20-ish instances of hydra, using different ruby gems

      • puppet helped locate/patch during a ruby vulnerability

  • devs have a burndown box - VM assigned to them. when they want to deploy an app, they write a puppet recipe for it. devs use a base script, make minor manifest tweaks for their app. once working, ticket put in to devops person who reviews it, once passed it is deployed to server

  • considering going to vagrant for laptops (so devs can get up to speed quicker)

  • all puppet scripts in github, but currently private. only sysadmins can merge PR’s to master, devs work on scripts in branches


 

Action Items:

  • The group all agreed that a HydraCamp covering operations/devops would be a great step forward

    • DCE may have some sample scripts from different engagements that could be a good starting point

  • Case Studies / White Papers

    • starting point (recognized as largely out of date): https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Deployment+Hardware+Information 

    • the group requests white papers from the community

    • case studies for people already in production to share w/ community.

    • requested case studies

      • ops, dev, or devops - what does that look like?

        • less than half on hardware they don’t control

      • migrating fedora instances

      • how to care/feed for production fedora (daily/weekly/monthly tasks, maintanence)

      • communication strategies

        • press releases from collection migration

      • cloud repository instance

      • campus IT or other external environment hosted

  • University of Cincinnati has an excel spreadsheet on production hardware configuration and deployment  from all hardware partners they will share

    • will add to existing wiki page

  • A RailsCast style deployment video - Steven Ng will take the lead on this concept