Leo Lapworth

Following on from The bad days

We made the decision that our problems in Kubernetes were exactly the sort of thing that should not be distractions to the project. We had been trying to save costs when we choose Hetzner for hosting... especially as we did not know where our ElasticSearch cluster (needing 3x32Gig of ram) was going to live. The great news is last week ElasticSeach agreed to host this for us, which really is a game changer.

With this in mind, we reviewed hosting again... Digital Ocean (DO) provides a fully managed Kubernetes control plane, with high availability load balancer, Postgres Database integration and storage options e.g. we can focus on deploying to it and not managing it.

And a few hours later Joel and I had updated all our manifests to work on DO. Joel setup nginx to do internal load balancing, we started the web front end and tested stopping a node. Everything worked! We switched over the Fastly setup to use this new cluster as production... so far all has been good.

As I went on to convert more pieces while Joel setup nfs server to share volumes between pods on different nodes. We then started the setup for grep.metacpan.org. Which we kicked of the initial setup at 8:40pm and then Joel remembered he had to get pasta de nata for his family before the best shop shut!

Grep.metacpan.org has a large repo it clones and this took quite a while, but by the next morning we were able to make it live.

So... we as MetaCPAN are in a much stronger position, using a managed service, and with more people understanding the setup. There is more work to do, but we achieved a lot in the few days we were together.. something that would have taken weeks with any other approach. The existence of the PTS events makes it possible.

Sponsors who make this possible Monetary sponsors: Booking.com, The Perl and Raku Foundation, Deriv, cPanel, Inc Japan Perl Association, Perl-Services, Simplelists Ltd, Ctrl O Ltd, Findus Internet-OPAC Harald Joerg, Steven Schubiger. In kind sponsors: Fastmail, Grant Street Group, Deft, Procura, Healex GmbH, SUSE, Zoopla.