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Slides – Cassandra for Sysadmins

Aug 10, 2011 at 4:57 PM by Nathan Milford | No Comments

At outbrain, we like things that are awesome.

Cassandra is awesome.

Ergo, we like Cassandra.

We’ve had it in production for a few years now.

I won’t delve into why the developers like it, but as a Sysadmin on-call in the evenings, I can tell you straight out I’m glad it has my back.

We have MySQL deployed pretty heavily, and it is fantastic at what it does.  However, MySQL has a bit of an administrative overhead compared to a lot of the new alternative data stores out there, especially when making MySQL work in a large geographically distributed environment.

If you can model your data in Cassandra, are educated about the trade-offs, and have an undying wish not to have to worry too deeply about managing replication and sharding, it is a no-brainer.

I did a presentation on Cassandra (with Jake Luciani from Datastax) to the NYC Chapter of the League of Professional System Administrators  (LOPSA) from the standpoint of an Admin.

Us Sysadmins fear change, because it is our butt on the line if there is an outage.  With executives anxiously pacing behind us and revenue flushing down the drain, we’re the last line of defense if there is an issue and we’re the ones who will be torn away from families in the evenings to handle an outage.

So, yeah… we’re a conservative lot

That being said, change and progress can be good, especially when it frees you up.  Cassandra is resilient, fault-graceful and elastic. Once you understand how so, you’ll be slightly less surly. Your developers might not even recognize you!

These slides are for the Sys Admin, noble fellow, to assuage his fears and get him started with Cassandra.

Visualizing Our Deployment Pipeline

Aug 1, 2011 at 8:28 AM by Ran Tavory | No Comments

The Annotated Timeline
This graph may seem intimidating at first, so don’t be scared and let’s dive right into it… BTW, you may click on the image to enlarge it.

In this graph the x axis shows the time (date and time of day) and the y axis shows the svn revision number. Each colored line represents a single module (so we have one line for www and one line for the BehavioralEngine etc).

What you would usually see is for each line (representing a module) a monotonically increasing value over time, a line from the bottom left corner towards the top right corner, however, in relatively rare cases where a developer wants to deploy an older version of his module, then you clearly see it by the line suddenly dropping down a bit instead of climbing up; this is really nice, helps find unusual events.

The Histogram
In the next graph you see an overview of deployments per day. (click to enlarge)

This is more of a holistic view of how things went the last couple of days, it just shows how many deployments took place each day (counts production clusters only) and colors the successful ones in green and the failed ones in red.

This graph is like an executive summary that can tell the story of – in case there are too many reds (or there are reds at all), then someone needs to take that seriously and figure out what needs to be fixed (usually that someone is me…) – or in case the bars aren’t high enough, then someone needs to kick developer’s buts and get them deploying somethin already…

Like many other graphs from Google’s library (this one’s a Stacked Column Chart, BTW), it shows nice tooltips when hovering over any of the columns with their x values (the date) and their y value (number of successful/failed deployments)

Versions DNA Mapping
The following graph shows the current variety of versions that we have in our production systems for each and every module. It was attributed as a DNA mapping by one of our developers b/c of the similarity in how they look but that’s how far this similarity goes…

The x axis lists the different modules that we have (names were intentionally left out, but you can imaging having www and other folks there). The y axis shows the svn versions of them in production. It uses glu’s live model as reported by glu’s agents to zookeeper.

Let’s zoom in a bit:

What this diagram tells us is that the module www has versions starting from 41268 up to 41463 in production. This is normal as we don’t necessarily deploy everything to all servers at once, but this graph helps us easily find hosts that are left behind for too long, so for example if one of the modules had not been deployed in a while then you’d see it falling behind low on the graph. Similarly, if a module has a large variability in versions in production, chances are that you want to close that gap pretty soon. The following graph illustrates both cases:

To implement this graph I used a crippled version of the Candle Stick Chart, which is normally used for showing stock values; it’s not ideal for this use case but it’s the closest I could find.

That’s all, three charts is enough for now and there are other news regarding our evolving deployment system, but they are not as visual; if you have any questions or suggestions for other types of graphs that could be useful don’t be shy to comment or tweet (@rantav).

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Monitoring a Wild Beast

May 30, 2011 at 2:45 PM by Ori Lahav | No Comments

Posted in IT/Ops| No Comments

LEGO Bricks – Our Data Center Architecture

Apr 12, 2011 at 8:59 PM by Ori Lahav | No Comments

Some of you might ask, ”why is he telling us about datacenter architecture? Don’t Cloud Services solve this already?” and some of you that already know me and what my opinions are on the subject will not be surprised. Yes, I’m not a fan of the Cloud Services and that is another discussion, however, there are some advantages for using Cloud Services that giving them up by establishing a datacenter felt somehow wrong for us.

Here are 2 of them:

1. Grow As You Go – When you build a datacenter you take on commitments for space (racks or cages) and high profile network gear that are investments you have to pay for in advance or before you really need to use them. This is not an issue for a Cloud-based setup because as you grow you spin up more instances.

2. Disaster Recovery Headroom – With a datacenter-based setup, in order to properly handle disaster recovery you need to double your setup so you can always move all your traffic to the other datacenter in case of disaster, which means doubling the hardware you buy. In the Cloud, this is also a non-issue.

These 2 arguments are very much correct, however even taking those into consideration, our setup is much more efficient in cost then any Cloud offering. The logic behind it is what I want to share here.

Traditionally, when a company’s business grows, a single rack or maybe 2 are not sufficient and you have the need to allocate adjacent racks space in a co-located datacenter. This makes your recurring expenses grow since you actually pay for reserved space that you don’t really use. It’s a big waste of your $$$. Once we managed to set more than one location for our service we found out that it will be much cheaper to build multiple small datacenters with a small space footprint than committing to a large space that we will not use most of the time. Adjacent space of at least 4 racks is much easier to find in most co-location facilities.  More than that, our co-location provider agreed to give us 2 active racks with first right of refusal for the adjacent 2 racks so we actually pay for those we use.

This architecture also simplified much of our network gear requirements. Assuming each “LEGO Brick” is small, it needs to handle only a portion of the traffic and not all of it. This does not require high profile network gear and very cheap Linux machines are sufficient for handling most of the network roles including load balancing, etc.

We continued this approach for choosing the intra-LEGO Brick switching gear. Here we decided to use Brocade stackable switching technology. In general, it means that you can put a switch per cabinet and wire all the machines to it. When you add another cabinet you simply connect them in a chain that looks and acts like a single switch. You can grow such a stack up to 8 switches. At Outbrain, we try to eliminate single points of failure, so we have 2 stacks and machines are connected to both of them. Again, the stacking technology gave us the ability to not pay for network gear before we actually need it.

But what about Disaster Recovery (DR) headroom? (We decided to implement more than one location for disaster recovery as soon as we started generating revenue for our partners.)  As I said, this is a valid argument. When we had 2 datacenters, 50% of our computing power was dedicated to DR and not used in normal time. This was not ideal and we needed to improve that. Actually, the LEGO bricks helped here once again. This week we opened our 3rd datacenter in Chicago. The math is simple, by adding another location our headroom dropped to only 33% which is a lot of $$$ savings when your business grows. When we add the 4th it will drop to 25%, etc.

I guess now you understand the logic and we can mention some fun info about the DC implementation itself:

• Datacenters communicate via a dedicated link, powered by our co-location vendor.
• We use a Global DNS service to balance traffic between the datacenters.
• In our newer datacenters, the power billing is a pay-per-use — no flat fees which again enable us to not pay for power we don’t use. It also motivates us to power off unneeded hardware and save power costs while saving the planet
• Power is 208V which is more efficient than the regular 110v.
• All servers are connected to a KVM to enable remote access to BIOS config if needed — much easier to manage from Israel and in general.
• We have a lot of Dell C6100s in our datacenters so each node there is also connected to an IPMI network in order to remotely restart each node without rebooting all 4 nodes in that chassis.
• You can read more about assembling these C6100s in Nathan’s detailed post.

I guess your question is “what does it take to manage this in terms of labor?” That answer is… not too much.

The Outbrain Operations team is a group of 4 Ops engineers. Most of the time they are not doing much related to the physical infrastructure, but like other ops teams, most of the time they handle the regular tasks of configuring infrastructure softwares (we use all of them from open source like MySQL, Cassandra, Hadoop, Hive, ActiveMQ, etc…), monitoring, code and system deployment (we heavily use Chef) etc.

In general, Operations’ role in the company is to keep the serving fast, reliable and (very important) cost-efficient.  This is the main reason why we invest time, knowledge and innovation in architecting our datacenters wisely.

I guess one of the next posts will be about our new Chicago datacenter and the concept of the “Dataless Datacenter.”

Ori

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