Skip to main content

Standardizing infra - lxd is not Docker

LXD logo from Ubuntu blog
Selling a software package that is deployed to a customer data-centre can be challenging due to the diversity found in the physical infrastructure.

It is expensive to make (and test) adjustments to the software that allow it to run in a non-standard manner.

Maintaining a swarm of snowflakes is not a scalable business practice. More deployment variations means more documentation and more pairs of hands needed to manage them. Uniformity and automation are what keep our prices competitive.

Opposing the engineering team's desire for uniformity is the practical need to fit our solution into the customers data-centre and budget. We can't define a uniform physical infrastructure that all of our customers must adhere to. Well, I suppose we could, but we would only have a very small number of customers who are willing and able to fit their data-centre around us.

We are therefore on the horns of a dilemma. Specifying standard physical hardware is impractical and limits the sales team. Allowing the sales team to adjust the infrastructure means that we have to tailor our platform to each deployment.

Virtualization is the rational response to this dilemma. We can have a standard virtualized infrastructure and work with the sales team and the customer to make sure that the hardware is able to support this. This way we'll know that our software is always deployed on the same platform.

LXD is a hypervisor for containers and is an expansion of LXC, the Linux container technology behind Docker. It's described by Stéphane Graber, an Ubuntu project engineer,as a "daemon exporting an authenticated representational state transfer application programming interface (REST API) both locally over a unix socket and over the network using https. There are then two clients for this daemon, one is an OpenStack plugin, the other a standalone command line tool."

It's not a replacement for Docker, even though Linux kernel provided containers are at the root of both technologies. So what is LXD for? An LXD container is an alternative to a virtual machine running in a traditional hypervisor.

With virtualization (or LXD containerization), if your customer has limited rack-space or a limited budget you can still sell your software based on a standard platform. You can take what metal is available and install LXD containers to partitition the resources up into separated "machines".

If you like, you can use Docker to manage the deployment of your software into these LXD containers. Docker and LXD are complementary!

In practical terms you can use tools like Ansible to automate the provisioning of your LXD containers on the customers metal. You are able to define in code the infrastructure and platform that your software runs on. And that means your engineering team wins at automation and your sales team wins at fitting the software into the customer data-centre.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted.  This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel.  A thorough comparison of the patterns is available  here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework.  It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database.  Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Word of the Day" PHP script (with word list)

I was looking around for a way to generate a word of the day on the web and didn't find anything. So I coded a quick and dirty script to do it. Just in case anybody does a Google search and manages to find my blog: here is my Word of the Day PHP script : Copy this code snippet into a wordoftheday.php file: $file = fopen("interesting_words.txt","r"); $raw_string = fread($file,filesize("interesting_words.txt")); fclose($file); $words_array = explode("|",$raw_string); echo $words_array[array_rand($words_array)]; Of course the real issue I had was finding a list of interesting words in the right format. Here is the list of interesting words that I used: Copy this into a file called interesting_words.txt : ubiquitous : being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent| ecdysiast : a striptease artist| eleemosynary : of, relating to, or dependent on charity| gregious : c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using Azure Active directory as an OAuth2 provider for Django

Azure Active Directory is a great product and is invaluable in the enterprise space. In this article we'll be setting it up to provide tokens for the OAuth2 client credentials grant. This authorization flow is useful when you want to authorize server-to-server communication that might not be on behalf of a user. This diagram, by Microsoft, shows the client credentials grant flow. From Microsoft documentation  The flow goes like this: The client sends a request to Azure AD for a token Azure AD verifies the attached authentication information and issues an access token The client calls the API with the access token. The API server is able to verify the validity of the token and therefore the identity of the client. The API responds to the client Setting up Azure AD as an OAuth2 identity provider The first step is to create applications in your AD for both your API server and the client. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to register the applications o...
Post a Comment
Read more