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by Haegin 1340 days ago
To solve the redundancy problem I wonder if running something like Hashicorp's Nomad on a few raspberry pis split across some friends houses could work nicely. Each site gets hosted at multiple houses for redundancy but no one person needs multiple devices.
2 comments
lucb1e 1340 days ago
Not familiar with Nomad; how does that work under the hood? Do you proxy all traffic through this third party who then load balances with a regular old http proxy, or is it actually self-hosted by the set of friends? With multiple DNS A records, this shouldn't work (it'll just fail in 1/N cases if 1 of the N IPs is down), so I'm curious how this is different from just hosting with Hashicorp directly.
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acaloiar 1340 days ago
Each friend's Nomad "client" (a node in the cluster) would accept a "job" which is the HTTP server. The missing piece is communicating back to some authority which clients are running the service, and on which ports. This could be done with DNS SRV records. Most commonly, Consul is used for DNS in a Nomad cluster.

This article is likely to give you a good idea of the architecture: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/load-balanci...

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lucb1e 1340 days ago
So if I understand it correctly, this haproxy they suggest is the new central point of failure? Sorry for being skeptical but I'm not really understanding the advantage.
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joeblubaugh 1340 days ago
You can also run multiple haproxies with identical config. One machine goes down? Your existing proxies still balance load to jobs.
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lucb1e 1338 days ago
But people would need to know which other domains run the other proxies. Might as well manually type in the other domain.

The only way I see to avoid a SPOF is with anycast, which I think involves running your own ISP to be able to arrange your own BGP sessions and announce at multiple locations.

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violetsy 1340 days ago
IIRC, Nomad doesn't do well with having clients on distant networks; you could have a server/client at each friend's house, but I don't recall off the top of my head how service discovery would work in that case. I'm sure it's supported by consul in some way though.
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