4 ms·

I think there’s degrees of cattleisation, I have in the past deployed crappy vendor software which needs a unique license key for each running instance. We disc

I think there’s degrees of cattleisation, I have in the past deployed crappy vendor software which needs a unique license key for each running instance. We discussed some sort of license service which would allow keys to be checked out when a container is started, but in the end settled on an auto scaling group with 1 instance for each running container with the key in an environment variable. That got us the comfort of knowing if the host machine died in the night the task would be rescheduled without a bunch of extra engineering to be able to scale arbitrarily when we only needed a couple of instances running.

fragmede 4y ago
Is this on AWS where instances get reaped and can't be transparently migrated to a different physical machine like that can on GCP, or is my info out of date? (Just haven't been on AWS for my latest projects.) Because yeah, that would also keep me up at night if random instances will randomly get deleted. My proposal that pets are actually totally okay relies on that not being the case. My real, pointed question is: what was the opportunity cost of cattelizing that vs any of the other work you could have done in that time? Because given a fresh instance but I'm allowed to use the rest of my infra, setting that machine back up in the morning should just be to instantiating the right docker container on the host and copying the license file in. Depending on what the vendor software does, I probably still wouldn't ASG that until it had actually happened more often than once a month - there are so many more things to stress about! Even if this were the splunk license checker, losing some log files would be quite disappointing but not the absolute end of the world - if you're losing api calls to stripe or the equivalent that's a different matter!

4 ms·

I think there’s degrees of cattleisation, I have in the past deployed crappy vendor software which needs a unique license key for each running instance. We disc

by jon-wood 4y ago

fragmede 4y ago
Is this on AWS where instances get reaped and can't be transparently migrated to a different physical machine like that can on GCP, or is my info out of date? (Just haven't been on AWS for my latest projects.) Because yeah, that would also keep me up at night if random instances will randomly get deleted. My proposal that pets are actually totally okay relies on that not being the case. My real, pointed question is: what was the opportunity cost of cattelizing that vs any of the other work you could have done in that time? Because given a fresh instance but I'm allowed to use the rest of my infra, setting that machine back up in the morning should just be to instantiating the right docker container on the host and copying the license file in. Depending on what the vendor software does, I probably still wouldn't ASG that until it had actually happened more often than once a month - there are so many more things to stress about! Even if this were the splunk license checker, losing some log files would be quite disappointing but not the absolute end of the world - if you're losing api calls to stripe or the equivalent that's a different matter!