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**David Flanagan:** \[39:54\] And \[unintelligible 00:39:52.24\] If we go back to applications ten years ago, we were writing monolithic applications that we scaled horizontally by just snapshotting the image and throwing it out. But those monolithic applications became exceedingly hard for large development teams to b... |
**Break:** \[40:45\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Even though we do have a monolith at Changelog.com, we're still using Kubernetes, because it handles a lot of complexity that we would need to handle differently in other places, and it would just hide it. So for example, managing DNS now is a declarative thing that happens in Kubernetes. Not all the ... |
So you have these baseline components, that's what I call them... But one component that works really well which runs right alongside it is Cert Manager. So we manage a certificate using Cert Manager; it works fairly well, it manages all our certificates. We have about en domains; eight, nine, ten - somewhere around th... |
**David Flanagan:** I'm so glad you said that, because I wrote an article in May, and the title of the article was "You may not require Kubernetes, but you need Kubernetes." And I think it's because we do get service discovery, we do get DNS, we get reconciliation and we get remediation... All of these things are just ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[44:00\] And this is where Marques comes in... So I know that David doesn't know this, and I know that very few (if any) listeners know this... But me and Marques - we started talking while Marques was at Linode. And at the time, we wanted to manage our Linode infrastructure for Changelog.com more ef... |
Marques since went to Crossplane, by the way. That was a very interesting period, and I was thinking "Oh, hang on... Maybe this Crossplane is worth a look." I didn't have the time until recently... I will continue with that. And now Marques is with Equinix Metal. So if you think about it, this is where I stand by what ... |
**Marques Johansson:** So you've been moving your infrastructure from -- a term I first heard from you, I think, which was \[unintelligible 00:45:26.13\] You've been moving from that to some sort of stateful configuration where you can treat your entire deployment as \[unintelligible 00:45:34.23\] And I think that's pr... |
One of the hurdles of that situation though is when things don't apply cleanly, or you need somebody to actually push that button, and that's where Crossplane comes in. Crossplane takes advantage of the Kubernetes reconciliation loop to bring these infrastructure components back to life, provision them the first time, ... |
So what do we have on the Equinix Metal side that allows you to use Crossplane? We do have a provider, and that provider allows you to deploy devices, \[unintelligible 00:46:50.05\] and IP addresses. There are many more infrastructure components that we can introduce, but we started with the ones that are most relevant... |
There are some other integrations with Crossplane that are useful to consider here, because when you are provisioning something -- if we take the Terraform model, you're provisioning infrastructure and then a lot of folks will rely on SSH-ing into that infrastructure to get it configured the way that they want it to be... |
\[47:55\] In our environment, where we have layer two configurations, you cannot SSH into the machine to perform the actions that you want without going through a gateway node, or without going through a serial terminal. So the way that you execute code on those machines or execute scripts on those machines is through ... |
One of the formats that's popular for configuring your user data is -- well, cloud-native is the tool, cloudconfig is the format. It's something like Salt, or Puppet, or Chef, where you have this declarative language to describe all the packages that you need installed, whether or not the system should be updated, desc... |
So one of the Crossplane providers that I worked on introduces \[unintelligible 00:48:44.02\] to Crossplane, which you can use in conjunction with the Equinix Metal provider, and you can stagger your deployment, in a way, to say "When this resource is fully configured, take some component of that, tie that into this cl... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm thinking more along the lines of having very good hardware, knowing exactly what hardware we are getting. That'll be one thing from the Equinix Metal side. Do you know that actually we run a single-node Kubernetes, because it's more reliable that multi-node Kubernetes? We've had so many issues wit... |
The amount of issues that we've had with three nodes was just embarrassing. You shouldn't need to have that. And this is like, you know, a certified Kubernetes installation, we always kept up to date, nothing specific... Volumes not unmounting... All sorts of weird Kube-proxy issues. I know that, David, you mentioned t... |
**David Flanagan:** Yeah, I think that Kube-proxy is one of those first components that's gonna be swapped out. I think we're already seeing that from Cilium. I don't know if you use Cilium as a CNI, but they're a good proxy replacement. Use an eBPF to route all the traffic... That's what I'd go for by default now. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Really? That's interesting. |
**David Flanagan:** Yeah, I remove the Kube-proxy whenever possible. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm pretty sure we use Calico, and I wanted to go to Cilium because of that. I need to hit Liz up. I really wanna talk to her about a few things, including this... |
**David Flanagan:** Well, I do have experience of doing an online CNI replacement in Kubernetes... \[unintelligible 00:50:51.29\] we could have a bit of fun with that. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, that's a good one. Okay... So yes, I've just confirmed we're using Calico. Which version of Calico, you ask... I can hear you asking that. It's version 3.19.1. So I'm not sure if that's the latest one, but anyways. So let me describe the sorts of issues that we're seeing. The tail of HTTP requests... |
Most requests complete really quickly, but some requests are really slow. There's nothing on the database side, there's nothing on the app side, there's plenty of CPU, plenty of memory... Everything is plenty resource-wise, but what we're seeing is that some requests which go via Kube-proxy are sometimes slow, inexplic... |
**David Flanagan:** \[51:54\] Yeah. I think we can have a lot of fun digging into that and seeing if we can work that one out, for sure. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So that is the follow-up which I have in mind, by the way, and the livestream I think would go really nicely with that. That's what I'm thinking. |
**David Flanagan:** Yeah, I'd love to do that. I think that'd be cool. Let's do it. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I just have to set up another one in parallel... And this is to a comment that Marques made earlier - we always set up a new setup for the next year, so that first of all we do a blue/green, so if something goes wrong, we can always go back... We can experiment, so we can try just to improve things... |
We do this so that we don't have to do upgrades in place, because we know how all that works... Not very well, by the way. Sometimes you can just run into weird issues and you wonder why you're the only one having this issue... And who can help you? Well, maybe an expert. And even then, it's a "maybe", it's not a defin... |
So David, where do you think that Equinix Metal would fit in Changelog? Or do you think that Equinix Metal is even a good choice for Changelog.com, considering it's just a monolith, it doesn't need that much power CPU-wise or memory-wise? It's mostly traffic, but the CDN handles most of it... So I think maybe 10% of th... |
**David Flanagan:** Yeah, I think where Equinix Metal would come on is if you wanted to then think it a bit further and build your own CDN. That is a really great use case, that takes advantage of the Equinix network, as well as the performance of the metal devices themselves. What I would encourage people to do is to ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like that you mentioned that, because the one thing which I've noticed is that whenever you have VMs, virtualized infrastructure, you tend to suffer from noisy neighbors. Weird issues that only happen on VMs. People don't realize that this stuff is real, and the bigger your setup is, the more... |
**David Flanagan:** I don't think people have ever really dug into what a \[unintelligible 00:54:48.06\] across the different tenants on the cloud... And all these things add up. Even the \[unintelligible 00:54:57.11\] There's contention across all of this, because of the cloud provider's interest to maximize the costs... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a good point. |
**Marques Johansson:** I'm concerned about your one-node cluster now... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay... |
**Marques Johansson:** Your one node is going up against other nodes. I assume this is all in your VM-managed cluster? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. It's LKE. We get a single node worker. The control plane, we just don't have access to it. We just use whatever the node provides; that one node where the workload actually runs... So we have the app, we have Ingress NGINX, a couple of pods basically in total... Again, let me tell you the exact n... |
**Marques Johansson:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[56:04\] Now, we back everything up every hour. We can restore everything from back-up and we test this often - every 3 to 6 months - so we can restore everything within 27 minutes the last time that I ran this, and everything's backed up. |
Also, everything goes through the CDN. So if the backend - "the origin", as it's called in Fastly - is not available, it will serve the stale content. Not the dynamic stuff, obviously... But to our users we will still be up, just a bit stale (pun intended). That's exactly what they will see. So it's unlikely that we wi... |
**Marques Johansson:** So you've just got 31 pods, and the scale here - you could probably have 31 large VMs running on bare metal, and each of those 31 VMs running from 31 pods, and then some... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Mm-hm. |
**Marques Johansson:** Yeah, it is interesting to imagine how it would fit, and maybe what more could fit. David pointed out - having a CDN that's taking advantage of more nodes and more networking availability... Do you have any thoughts on what you might do with more CPU and storage? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I don't think we would need more CPU and storage. I honestly don't. The app itself is a single instance, because it is a Phoenix app. It's using the Erlang VM. So it scales really nicely when it comes to CPUs available. So a single machine can serve all the traffic many times over. Like, a hundred tim... |
So let's imagine that if we were to have a CDN, if we were to run a CDN ourselves, I think most of the costs would be bandwidth. And then would we use the Erlang VM? Maybe... I don't know. Maybe we'd use something else, like Varnish, or something like that (I don't know), to just cache the content and just serve it lik... |
But these are all great ideas, and I'm wondering, if someone has been listening to this, what is the one key takeaway that they should take, Marques? What do you think? |
**Marques Johansson:** You've mentioned Fly... So that's one of the strengths with Equinix Metal, is that we have a lot of partners available. So there's a lot of services that are already running here... And if they're not running on Equinix Metal, they're running on Equinix. So kind of combined strengths of different... |
Earlier I was talking about the Crossplane composition, and maybe that's what your solution looks like. I wanna make sure that I add a -- it's not a preface now; a suffice... That's not necessarily the direction that you should go. You did mention that you're doing the blue/green deployments, so that's excellent to hea... |
So I would that of the Changelog delivery, the whole content system, in general for Equinix Metal I think the takeaway is that if you're doing something that only requires a handful of pods and you don't need a global presence and you don't need a lot of CPU, you don't need a lot of memory and disk, a VM might be the r... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think this is meant to be controversial, this last part, so I'll make it even more so... I disagree with some of the things you've said... The direction is sound, but what I would say is that if you do use bare metal, you tend to have less problems just because you're using bare metal... Especially ... |
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