titpetric

Big respect for your achievements. I guess at some point it just becomes the question of "where do i get a 1000 nodes" vs. "how do I run a 1000 containers". Or, more the justification for that amount of hardware - I mean, the one dream job which I would probably want is getting paid to cut out all the hardware use while keeping reliability/availability/functionality. Like these guys who cut their AWS bill by $1mil/year in about 3 months - https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/. The thing is that I'm not exactly sure where I'd fit in more - running this thing, or just fixing it for somebody else. I definitely know that I'm mostly dealing with pets and not cattle :)

Actually, neither should be a problem if you have enough redundancy :) the hardest part of rolling your own infrastructure is testing mission critical systems (like databases) to be fault tolerant and at the same time reliable. Lots of great projects are out there that address some of these issues, but it takes a lot of attention to details (like transaction rates, ACID compliance, replication, etc.) to get it right. This is why a lot of developers which aren't in unicorn startups take advantage of technology which is available from giants like Amazon or Google, or specific problem-domain companies like CloudFlare for example. Netflix serves as a great example of a technology-driven company that is an inspiration to us, but there are so many others that really changed the way we approach problems - Tumblr, Etsy. But to stay on topic of netflix - I think their idea behind "chaos monkey" is great, and we're increasingly rolling out a (currently simple) docker swarm version of it - https://github.com/titpetric/docker-chaos-monkey - the best way to eliminate worry is to test failure scenarios. As docker chaos monkey is designed to unpredictably "kill off" containers, your system gets the benefit of design to handle failures. It's one of those problems that you have to have a passion for however - it's like testing software. You're only testing software for the functionality and failures which you can predict, and I'm pretty sure that any of us can't predict all the ways in which software (or distributed systems) can fail. As such, it's a never ending occupation. :)

Hi, OP author here: I have actually set up a VRRP (well, UCARP) on Docker, so it's possible even to containerize this facet of running a HA ops stack with Docker as the infrastructure. It is however, as you say, it is only used for one active node + a number of fail-overs in case that one goes down. In terms of maintenance (hosts do go down, scheduled downtime is common), it's priceless to have this part of the puzzle portable as well. If you want to check it out, there's a github available here: https://github.com/titpetric/ucarp-ha - and a future article with it is planned as well. It will also become a part of the E-book which I'm currently working on and publishing on leanpub: https://leanpub.com/12fa-docker-golang :)