New server deployments
Added 2019-11-24 00:47:10 +0000 UTCWe've been hard at work re-designing the platform that runs the site. For years we've run on one huge high spec server which has fortunately been very reliable, but it's always been a single point of failure.
Enter: The Cloud Platform!
Using the wonderful magic that is cloud hosting, we are designing a new platform which will help us make the site ready for the next several years.
Redundant servers
Instead of using the one large server, we are splitting the site components into a few servers. This design will help us begin scaling our ability to serve images. If we are getting a huge burst of traffic, we will be able to quickly provision more image server capacity, and then reduce once the burst is over.
Ansible is a fantastic tool which we are using to spin up new servers for testing. Once our playbooks are finished, we will be able to deploy more servers in an instant.
Cloud Object Storage
Another big change is our image storage. Our previously mentioned big hefty server stores images on disk, backed by a RAID array. This can tolerate a single disk failure, but it doesn't scale very well. Once we're close to running out of space, we would need to move to another server.
By moving to DigitalOcean Spaces, we can leverage cloud object storage, which can go as big as we need. Spaces also takes away the concern about losing more than one disk, which only becomes more likely as the current server ages.
We would like to thank all our patrons for helping make these improvements possible!
