One of the things with my new job is that I’m getting exposed to a lot of new tech that’s pretty interesting. I’m also finding that not doing a huge amount of new tech stuff for the last 10 years or so has gotten me really behind in terms of what is out there.
Some of the new sexy that I get to play with / learn / be frustrated with:
Proxmox
Proxmox is sort of a virtual machine manager on steroids. At the absolute base it’s a linux distro that will run a UI that lets you create virtual machines – either full virtual machines or ”light” ones (basically containers in a way). If you take it up to the next level, you can connect multiple servers together with Proxmox on them and control them all from one location. This also means that you can move virtual machines around from one server to another to better manage resources.
Taking it to another level and it will run CEPH, which is a way to manage storage that’s distributed between multiple servers. So take 2 or 3 servers with a metric butt-tonne of fast disks, connected by a really fast network, and now those VMs (or other machines) can use that big fat chunk of disk as needed. You can also seamlessly add disks and space. I might be off a bit about the CEPH stuff, I haven’t worked with it too much, at least not yet. I don’t really have a need for this, or a machine that’s got the guts to do it well, but it’s fun to play with.
HA proxy
HA Proxy is a high speed load balancer / proxy server for http and https traffic. So you can stick one of these (or a few) in front of a few webservers and you can tell it where to direct traffic based on URL (so for example anything going to site.com goes to webservers 1 and 2, but site.com/blog goes to webserver 3. This is a case of ”well if I only had more than 1 webserver I’d totally use that”. Also move than 5 hits a week would probably help. Most likely it’d make the sites work faster though.
ProxySQL
This isn’t something that’s as interesting for me to use in my ”personal” (technology) life, but neat as well, but still takes a while for me to get my brain around. Basically it’s (another) high availability load balancer, but this is for your SQL servers. Same sort of idea, put this in front of a bunch of SQL servers and you can connect to just it, and have connections go to other servers on the backend. You can also set up so that some are read only and some are read write. So you can send all your writes to the ”big” server and read from other smaller specc’d servers.
Another thing to think about using when you have a site that gets more than 5 hits a week.