3 ms·

HA is overrated, i'd much rather go for a low mean time to repair. Backups, reinstall, ansible playbook is my way to go if hardware fails, which is quite rare t

HA is overrated, i'd much rather go for a low mean time to repair. Backups, reinstall, ansible playbook is my way to go if hardware fails, which is quite rare to be honest. HA goes beyond hardware in terms of "electricity, internet connection, storage, location etc.., IMO people quite often underestimate what it means to have real HA --> second location with identical setup to shift workload or even have active-active instead of active-passive. i have an intel nuc as plain debian server with containers on it. 2 raspberry pi's(act as loadbalancers with traefik and authelia on top) and a hetzner vm all connected through wireguard. All is configured via ansible and i rely on LE certificates to connect via https or directly via wireguard vpn to http if i want it only exposed via vpn. encrypted backups are copied via wireguard to an offsite storage box. full down to back online if hardware is not damaged is less than 15 min. it is very easy to do and rock solid, unattend-upgrades does the trick. i tried almost every combination and even though i am a k8s user from version 1.2 onwoards the complexity for k8s at home or even vsphere is too much for me vs. this super simple and stable configuration i now have.

2143 4y ago
I'm not from this universe. What does HA stand for? Thank you.
- ranic 4y ago
  High Availability, I believe.
R0b0t1 4y ago
Quick to repair is also a lot more versatile. Unfortunately, I had to work in a lot of environments with proprietary, vendor-locked software and hardware. Usually all you can do is make sure you design the system so that you can chuck entire parts of it (possibly for rework, but sometimes not) if it breaks or gets compromised. Definitely relevant for, say, SCADA controls with terrible security.
j45 4y ago
HA is built into platforms like proxmox, what is the stress?
- woopwoop24 4y ago
  tl:dr if you need it, go for it :) my 2 cents is not needed at home and even for some of my clients the complexicty vs a simple setup and a few min downtime still speaks for MTTR instead of HA which noone can debug. not about stress but to have HA proxmox cluster you will need at least 3 machines or fake one with a quorum machine without vms on it. Sure your vms will run if one machines goes down, but do you have HA Storage underneath? ganesha would work but more complexity or another network storage with more machines. Don't get me wrong it is fun to play with, but i doubt any homelab needs HA and cannot have a few minutes downtime. Or what do you do in case your internet provider goes down or when you have a power outage? i don't want to provoke, i have fiber switches and 10G at home and have 2 locations to switch in case one location goes down but i can live with multiple days of downtime if i have to, or if not i take my backups and fire some VM's on some cloudprovider and be back online in a few min and pay for it because backups are in both locations. i would much rather develop a simple LB + autoscaling group with a deployment pipeline (lambda or some other control loop) and containers on it than a k8s cluster the client is not prepared for. if they outgrow this, most likely the following solution is better than going 100% "cloud" the first time. Most clients go from java 8 Jboss monolith to spring containers in k8s and then wonder why it is such a shitshow. but yeah pays the bills so i am not complaining that often ^^
  - j45 4y ago
    Your right that an HA bar is a higher one. And the more ornate your tech stack the more work for HA. More reasonably, mirroring a few Intel NUCs isn’t that far fetched where backups can spill off to a pair of mirrored nas’. If storage failover is needed, it’s not hard to find a used fibre channel storage array on eBay. For the network, lots of capable little devices like the edgerouters. 2 internet connections (Cable/dsl + LTE) isn’t that crazy anymore. Starlink will be interesting too. Power? A UPS or two can keep up a few hours on a low wattage system. In turn can be run by a bigger deep cycle battery, maybe feed by some solar or a small generator.
bravetraveler 4y ago
I completely agree, but there's an important balance to consider. HA is a good investment for things that are 'stateless' -- eg: VIPs/LBs Rebuilding existing systems (or adding new ones) is excellent, but sometimes life really gets simpler when you have one well-known/HA endpoint to use in a given context
xani_ 4y ago
> HA is overrated, i'd much rather go for a low mean time to repair. Those are almost entirely independent domains the only point where they connect is that > full down to back online if hardware is not damaged is less than 15 min. automation makes both easier to deal with. "Mean time to repair" is all fine if you don't have to drive 30 minutes to datacenter to swap out stuff. Even if its cloudy cloud and you have backups, restores can take a lot of time. Also you will want HA when it's your internet gateway to die There are also levels of implementation. Making fully redundant set of loadbalancers is relatively easy. But any stateful app is much, much harder. In case of applications active-passive type of setups are also much easier than full on active active redundancy, especially if app wasn't written for it.

2143 4y ago

I'm not from this universe. What does HA stand for? Thank you.

ranic 4y ago
High Availability, I believe.

R0b0t1 4y ago

Quick to repair is also a lot more versatile. Unfortunately, I had to work in a lot of environments with proprietary, vendor-locked software and hardware. Usually all you can do is make sure you design the system so that you can chuck entire parts of it (possibly for rework, but sometimes not) if it breaks or gets compromised. Definitely relevant for, say, SCADA controls with terrible security.

j45 4y ago

HA is built into platforms like proxmox, what is the stress?

woopwoop24 4y ago
tl:dr if you need it, go for it :) my 2 cents is not needed at home and even for some of my clients the complexicty vs a simple setup and a few min downtime still speaks for MTTR instead of HA which noone can debug. not about stress but to have HA proxmox cluster you will need at least 3 machines or fake one with a quorum machine without vms on it. Sure your vms will run if one machines goes down, but do you have HA Storage underneath? ganesha would work but more complexity or another network storage with more machines. Don't get me wrong it is fun to play with, but i doubt any homelab needs HA and cannot have a few minutes downtime. Or what do you do in case your internet provider goes down or when you have a power outage? i don't want to provoke, i have fiber switches and 10G at home and have 2 locations to switch in case one location goes down but i can live with multiple days of downtime if i have to, or if not i take my backups and fire some VM's on some cloudprovider and be back online in a few min and pay for it because backups are in both locations. i would much rather develop a simple LB + autoscaling group with a deployment pipeline (lambda or some other control loop) and containers on it than a k8s cluster the client is not prepared for. if they outgrow this, most likely the following solution is better than going 100% "cloud" the first time. Most clients go from java 8 Jboss monolith to spring containers in k8s and then wonder why it is such a shitshow. but yeah pays the bills so i am not complaining that often ^^
- j45 4y ago
  Your right that an HA bar is a higher one. And the more ornate your tech stack the more work for HA. More reasonably, mirroring a few Intel NUCs isn’t that far fetched where backups can spill off to a pair of mirrored nas’. If storage failover is needed, it’s not hard to find a used fibre channel storage array on eBay. For the network, lots of capable little devices like the edgerouters. 2 internet connections (Cable/dsl + LTE) isn’t that crazy anymore. Starlink will be interesting too. Power? A UPS or two can keep up a few hours on a low wattage system. In turn can be run by a bigger deep cycle battery, maybe feed by some solar or a small generator.

bravetraveler 4y ago

I completely agree, but there's an important balance to consider. HA is a good investment for things that are 'stateless' -- eg: VIPs/LBs Rebuilding existing systems (or adding new ones) is excellent, but sometimes life really gets simpler when you have one well-known/HA endpoint to use in a given context

xani_ 4y ago

> HA is overrated, i'd much rather go for a low mean time to repair. Those are almost entirely independent domains the only point where they connect is that > full down to back online if hardware is not damaged is less than 15 min. automation makes both easier to deal with. "Mean time to repair" is all fine if you don't have to drive 30 minutes to datacenter to swap out stuff. Even if its cloudy cloud and you have backups, restores can take a lot of time. Also you will want HA when it's your internet gateway to die There are also levels of implementation. Making fully redundant set of loadbalancers is relatively easy. But any stateful app is much, much harder. In case of applications active-passive type of setups are also much easier than full on active active redundancy, especially if app wasn't written for it.