systems
Worries about ‘prohibitive cost of powering, maintaining, and deploying a third node’
Red Hat has come up with a way to reduce the quantity of servers needed for high-availability edge deployments of its OpenShift platform, because its customers worry about high hardware costs.The IBM business unit’s Daniel Froehlich and Paul Lancaster last week introduced Red Hat’s approach in a post that saw the pair observe interest in “alternative topologies for large-scale edge deployments” due to “the prohibitive cost of powering, maintaining, and deploying a third node across hundreds or thousands of sites – a motivation that has only grown stronger in light of the recent steep increase in hardware prices.”
That’s an interesting admission given that Red Hat already offers a way to run OpenShift with two nodes, by using an “arbiter” – a device with at least two virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and 50GB of solid-state storage. The arbiter maintains quorum between the two nodes to help avoid the “split-brain problem” – a situation that occurs when a two-node cluster loses connectivity, and both servers assume they need to take over and act as the primary node. Each node will then run in parallel, possibly overwriting changes and making all sorts of mess.
