Distributed Web Systems with Consul, Diplomat, Envoy and HAProxy

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 01:30:00 +0100

As part as my never-ending quest to improve how I build cool things, I’ve been working for some time on building out infrastructure to help automate and monitor how my apps and servers are doing. I’ve written about horizontal scaling before, but today I’d like to get into one specific facet of its implementation: automated network discovery, and how we use it at FarmGeek to build reliable applications.

The Problem

So lets say you have a few servers - a node balancer, two application servers and a database server, for example. Everything’s working fine until BAM, one of your application servers crashes. To make things worse, in this scenario for an unexplained reason nobody finds out about this. However your HAProxy checks work and so the node leaves the connection pool as expected.

11 Things windows users might not know about Linux

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 23:43:00 +0000

As an avid Linux user for over 5 years, it still surprises me how many people don’t know basic things about Linux which make it so appealing to people like me. If you’re thinking about using Linux for the first time, or perhaps you’ve only just heard about it, here are a few things you might now know that might interest you:

1: Linux isn’t an operating system

Linux is actually the name given the “kernel” of one type of operating system. There are hundreds of thousands of Linux distributions for you to choose from. Linux draws its inheritance back from UNIX which was a proprietary operating system back in the 70s. We call the entire thing “Linux” because its easier and simpler for people who are new to Linux. Each one of those versions of Linux is referred to as a “distribution” or “flavour”. Ubuntu is a popular distribution of Linux, as is RedHat, Fedora, SuSE and Debian. Some people like to call linux GNU/Linux, because the operating system runs a suite of tools called the GNU toolkit on top of its self, in order for it to be complete.

Operating-Systems on John Hamelink

Distributed Web Systems with Consul, Diplomat, Envoy and HAProxy

The Problem

11 Things windows users might not know about Linux

1: Linux isn’t an operating system