chucky_z

"The tricky part is then notifying the hell out of everyone who needs to be notified that something really bad has happened, a failover occurred, everything is OK, but it needs some attention ASAP."

If there is a need for multiple 9's of uptime, there should be an escalation process for these kinds of events, which will probably include 24/7 on-call rotations.

Even if the problem is entirely self-resolving, it should still be looked at by more than one system. It should be noted, observed, documented, and confirmed it's truly resolved. That system is usually a human, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.

Can I ask why HAProxy seems to be a more popular choice than the very, very simple (and robust) pgbouncer?

What? In the case of Microsoft rebooting/migrating an instance causing a failure, Keepalived will automatically failover.

The manual failover is in case of something going horribly wrong (outside of hardware failure), in which case a human steps in, looks at the situation, determines the best solution... and if it's failover, they initiate the failover.

I've personally used this procedure in the past and it worked 100% of the time there was a failure in a production environment. The tricky part is then notifying the hell out of everyone who needs to be notified that something really bad has happened, a failover occurred, everything is OK, but it needs some attention ASAP.

In PGSQL world, there are even a handful of tools to help you turn the old (failed) master into a slave, and correctly escalate the old (promoted) slave into a master; all in a single command on each side (which can be kicked off through keepalived).

From a purely seat-of-my-pants-im-trying-to-remember-college point of view, I believe the heat is caused far more by pumping tons of electricity, rather than physical size/layout.

A big problem (and also probably why they're so thin) is that at a certain size latency becomes a huge issue. This is where clock speed increases come into play (electrons move faster) along with die decreases (electrons can travel shorter distances).

If you can run 100mph, but you have to run 200 miles vs. someone who can walk 1mph, but only has to walk 10 feet... I wish I had some more concrete examples but I can't come find anything off the top of my head.

Actually, I'm very curious if you have any opinions on combining OSes and some of the tooling that's been coming out (etcd (without CoreOS), and Consul are two examples that come to my mind).

A lot of these container OS's seem to have so much built-in tooling that it seems "wrong" to consider using extra tooling on top of them.

Not the above, but I can chime in. Ragnarok Online private servers are (now) an entirely different beast than any of the official servers.

Automatic events, large custom maps, all sorts of fun player oriented stuff; custom classes, custom gear, new sprites for players and monsters, new colors all over the place, different balancing... All built on top of this ancient engine that's been ported and rebuilt a dozen or so times now.

Reading a bit of Ragnarok Online's private server history is very interesting.

Oh, this thing is ancient!

Still cool.

https://github.com/SiPlus/WebQuake

There is a node.js multiplayer server included in the repo that works half-decent. :)