Update on my travels the last two workdays
Tags :Technical
So faithful reader, where has Chris been last
Thur and Fri that he vanished from all reasonable postings? Well
I was scooped up, hooded, spun three times and placed in the back of a
black truck before being whisked to a government facility. Ok. part
of that is true.
We were called in last minute to help scale
a LearningSpace infrastructure. The website itself will be public,
but where we had to go was not. It is amazing the security precautions
and what you go through to even move a server from build-up to production.
At least three different groups are involved in that activity and
once that server leaves the build-up, odds are (if it stays running) you
will never see it again except through a remote console.
So let's move into the tech side since
I can't say any more detail about the above. It was a simple tiered
architecture without much redundancy. The real issue was the number
of concurrent users they get now and what is expected by Aug. There
was no way that they could handle the load. We ended up taking the
3 server environment to 7 total with some hardware load balancers. All
this was architected, installed, configured and ready for production in
two days. The site will actually go live on their scheduled outage
time of Tue nights though.
The end result was a LearningSpace 5 environment
behind a few firewalls, a load balancer, then 4 core servers, 2 content
servers and some back-end database servers to provide the redundancy and
scaling needed to reach their concurrency goal. I would love to give
the nitty-gritty details like usual but just be happy and pleased with
that. But no, they are not using LDAP so there is no tech info there.
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On Monday, February 21st, 2005 by Chris Miller
