Talk:IT Development/Proposals/Infrastructure

My remarks

I want to address 3 points:

• We need IMO a permanent test VM to be able to test any change we want to implement before doing it on prod. (at least for the Web services like CiviCRM, Mediawikis, ...).
• What about the backups of these VMs? I think we should have somewhere, something like rsnapshot running (incremental backup)? Or should we backup whole VMs? Do both?
• What about a mirror for critical services? Do we need one? If not, what would be the recover strategy base on the backups in case of disaster? My opinion is that we should have a backup&mirror solution running somewhere else (other company, other place) in UK. Kelson (talk)

Certainly a backup server would be good; and really depends on the capacity required. The host usually has a feature for snapshots/VM backup so I don't think we need to worry about that. But if we have all the code/files (including configuration) in version control (and possible a provisioning system like Puppet) that could be backed up, along with SQL dumps etc. Also we discussed backups for a server in the office for files. So a standalone VM to dump all of that on sounds sensible. One of the problems with backing up to an external provider, however, is that data charges can begin to escalate... I'd suggest we have a main backup server within the same cloud account which takes regular syncs from the other servers - and we can set up a system to archive it to "cold storage" (something like Amazon glacier). In terms of hot mirrors with another host; I think that would be worth putting as a separate item after migration; once we have everything in source control etc. then it will be a bit easier to set that up. --ErrantX (talk) 14:56, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Regular backups by the same company seems to me acceptable if the provider can garanty that the backups are not in the same place/city like the originals. OK to speak about mirroring later. Kelson (talk) 15:09, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Past thinking

It might be worth having a look at 2012 Developer budget (in particular the 'Servers' section) for past thinking on infrastructure. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 12:37, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Kelson (talk) 16:33, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Nearly there

I just have a couple more things to hear back on. Kelson, Mike, anyone else - comments on these suppliers?? Other supplier suggestions. --ErrantX (talk) 16:03, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Both ElasticHosts and Rackspaces seem good to me, but you can only have a Debian at Rackspace ;) Kelson (talk) 16:33, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Rackspace definitely let you choose Ubuntu (see video on this page: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/cloud-hosting/learn-more/cloud-demos/). Plus we can upload our own images if needed. Same applies to Elastic Hosts I think. --ErrantX (talk) 16:51, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks for putting this page together - it's great to see this being fully considered. :-) My comments are as follows:

• Rackspace - I've been aware of this organisation for around a decade now (as has Wikipedia since 2007) and I've yet to hear a bad word against it, which means that I personally have a lot of trust in this organisation. From what you've set out here, it appears to meet all of our needs, and does so cost-effectively - so all looks good here. :-) Are there reasons for preferring Ubuntu to Debian here? (I've used Ubuntu but not Debian, but understand that both are good?)
• FireHost - I haven't heard of them before (and neither has Wikipedia), but it's great to see that they are PCI compliant out of the box. However, I'm not sure that this is a cost-effective approach - but we need to balance person-time vs hosting cost here.
• Coreix - again, I haven't heard of them before (and neither has Wikipedia). Their offer sounds good, but we do need something up and running sooner than January...
• Elastic Hosts - again, I haven't heard of them before (and neither has Wikipedia). They sound workable, though, but due to the complications they don't seem to be quite as good a match as Rackspace.

Overall, Rackspace is looking like the best option by quite a margin... Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:28, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

It also occurs to me we could even use Rackspace's Cloud Files system for backups - cheaper than our own backup server. I'll ping Katherine later today to get an account set up & get us started. --ErrantX (talk) 10:07, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Ping away - tell me exactly what you need though, including in terms of set up/handover :) Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 11:44, 20 November 2012 (UTC)