Fun

Interesting (infrastructure) tidbits about Groupon

I am attending the Camp DevOps conference in Chicago over the weekend and one of the speakers was Zack Steinkamp. Zack manages the operations tools group in addition to information security at Groupon. He spoke about a custom configuration management tool called “roller” (http://steinkamp.us/campdevops.pdf) that is used at Groupon. He said the tool is scheduled to be open sourced soon. roller is very similar to puppet, chef, bcfg2 etc. I am not sure if we need yet another configuration management tool, but Zack made a good point for why there is a need for a simpler and secure configuration management tool.

Anyways.. this post is not about roller, but rather about some tidbits that Zack shared about Groupon’s infrastructure in the talk

  • Groupon started out with ~100 servers
    • The operations function was outsourced to a third party
    • No automation in place.. all servers were “handcrafted”
  • Currently running ~1000 servers in 6 locations (globally)
    • Building their own data center
  • Running 4 different Linux distros in prod
  • Currently using Amazon and another cloud provider
  • Not a hugh believer in public cloud for future expansion
    • Zack spoke about how the lack of consistency in the IO/CPU performance is an issue on the public clouds
  • Does not heavily use virtualization in production
  • Uses Nagios for monitoring
  • SW Architecture
    • Started out as a “wordpress” blog
    • Then migrated into a Rails App
    • Currently the Rails App is huge
    • MySQL is the DB

 

October 23, 2011 by Fun Technology Uncategorized 0

Only Amazon can make free sound more free :)

I am hoarder :).. Esp for free stuff. That’s one of the reason, I have the Amazon Android App Store on my phone. Amazon gives “away” a free app every day. Even though I don’t really use/need the app that Amazon gives away, I get it, just in case. It is free :), so why not?

The apps usually cost something if brought in the regular app store, but Amazon makes them available for free for a day. So yesterday, I was surprised to see a free app appear in the free app of the day section. What gives?

October 5, 2011 by Fun Uncategorized 0

Huh…???

I was checking out the live feed from Facebook regd the video service they rolled out yesterday and noticed this comment on the live feed form.. all I can say is WTF 🙂

July 7, 2011 by Fun Rantings Uncategorized 0

RESOLUTIONS : 2011 : January Update

As I mentioned here, I have made some resolutions for 2011. As with any good task list, it is worthless unless you take a look at it periodically and update it :). I am going to publish an update on each one of the resolutions every month. Here goes the first one

  1. Loose weight (AKA loose gut)
    • I am practicing part of the diet proposed by Tim Ferris in his Four Hour Body book. I am eating 2 egg whites for breakfast and than eating a small meal every 4 hours. I haven’t gone completely into the whole “white” carb diet he proposes though.
    • I also started tracking my weight and diet religiously on a daily basis. This is another of Tim’s ideas. He says that by tracking your weight everyday, you subconsciously start making better choices in terms of the food you eat. I this it makes sense :). I am tracking the data in a Google spreadsheet. Here is a chart of my weight for the last one month I started out at 194 lbs and am not at 188 lbs. Hopefully I will be able to keep this downward trend.
    • I also started working out (thanks to Jhanvi). We are working out at least 2 times a week.
  2. Increase web traffic to kudithipudi.org
    • I started posting more content on the site. I posted 8 articles in January.
    • No particular strategy other than writing more content, which will hopefully bring more traffic.
    • Have the following topics to write on (and some of them have been pending for a long time)
      • Moving your life to the cloud
      • Setting up a virtual server on the Rackspace Cloud Infrastructure
      • Configuring syslog-ng
      • Configuring nginx to reduce resource utilization on Linux server
  3. Achieve CISSP certification
    • No progress on this one at all.
  4. Go on a vacation
    • Jhanvi and I planned to go to the travel and adventure expo, that was held in Rosemont last weekend, but we got too lazy :).
    • Our trip to India (and it doesn’t count as a vacation 🙁 ) is planned for April.

Progress on 2 out of the 4 resolutions!!.. Not bad :).

PS : Thanks for all the support I have been getting on the first resolution :). I didn’t realize the situation was so bad :).

February 1, 2011 by Fun Resolutions Uncategorized 1