[Gllug] Geographcial server failover

[Ian Northeast]

Darren Beale wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I'm a bit out of my depth and would like some advice please.
> 
> Later this year my company will be launching a web service that will
> be collecting data 24/7 and which needs to be available 100% (or near
> as poss) of the time. Local clustering and availability is well
> covered in the plenty of documentation and books out there. However
> when it comes to balancing across geographically separate locations
> when one location goes down, the other picks up ALL of the requests,
> then this is not covered in as much detail, if at all.

We're using Akamai for this. It's part of their edge caching service.

I don't pay, or pay any attention to, the bills. I seriously doubt if 
they're cheap. I concern myself with the technical details only - a 
luxury you can only afford if you work for a large company, and one of 
the main reasons I still do so (there's also job security and getting to 
play with seriously large servers).

We've not had a serious failure, and I wouldn't be thanked for 
engineering one. So I can't say how their service would cope in the 
event of one. They *say* it'll work.

Akamai have done two things that I noticed:

We asked them to make a change on a Saturday. They don't have regular 
staff on Saturdays, so they automated it. They cocked it up and it 
happened on Sunday.

After we activated the load balance/failover, I stopped receiving the 
server logs. The Apache logs on my servers are useless for trend 
reporting, they just show that my servers are being accessed by Akamai 
caches. So Akamai email me the real logs daily. But after this change I 
started receiving an empty email every day. It took them a month and two 
reminders to fix. To be fair, this was over the Xmas period.

So two minor cockups which no-one outside our department has noticed. 
Otherwise it's worked fine. But nothing on our side has failed. Yet.

Regards, Ian



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