[Web4lib] high availability web service infrastructure: your experiences?

[Francis Kayiwa]

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On Jan 31, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Tom Wood wrote:

Tom,

I am curious why this would be any different from any other (non- 
library) environment. A highly available webserver is the same  
regardless of where -no? :-) Embracing the 'no silver bullet  
philosophy I will share my experience with this in a none library  
environment and with any luck it will help or at worst guide you on  
what not to do.


>   * What sort of high availability architecture do you use?  (e.g.,
> clustering, load balancing, etc.)  What is the scope of your
> architecture? (e.g., web server, application server, database, etc.)
>
>   * If clustering or load balancing, how do you distribute your web
> content to your servers? (e.g., replication/mirroring, network file
> system, global file system, etc.)
>
>   * How do you move your content/applications through
> development/staging/production?  (e.g., home grown tools, version
> control system, content management system, etc.)
>
>   * Do you use a content management system in a high availability
> configuration?  Any quirks, words of wisdom, etc.?

For our purposes we chose CARP on three servers. HTTP is stateless so  
YMMV. I shared the load with round-robin in DNS to provide failover.  
This is not perfect but it works for. For instance I can imagine  
server one going down and still receiving hits. Still I don't think  
about this choice that much. :-) (You may though.)

We installed

http://www.backhand.org/wackamole/

This is still further complicated with the Apache logs (minor  
complication but a complication nonetheless.)

So we live with a combination of cronjobs + rsync to make sure all  
servers remain mirrored.

I cannot recall why we didn't choose the Linux Virtual Server project.

http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

which seems to have active development and will probably address most  
of your needs above.

regards,
./fxk

===============
Francis Kayiwa
Library Systems Team
4-180, MC 234
T: +1.312.996.2716
W: http://www.uic.edu/~kayiwa
Key: http://tigger.uic.edu/~kayiwa/kayiwa.gpg


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