Searching for a Scalable, Centralised Config System
by Geoff McQueen on Sep.22, 2009, under General
We’ve got some exciting plans cooking in the cauldron over at Hiive Systems, and one of them involves replacing our existing config management system for deployments – a couple of config files separated into always changes and rarely changed parts – with something more scalable, dynamic while still very fast to query and read.
While our back-end is running on MySQL, I’m concerned that there might be a faster way to do things. I’m looking for some insight from people who’ve “been there and done that” already, though, as this is going to be a lot of work to test and check – if someone has already got some experience with this, I’d love to hear it!
I’m looking at LDAP because our configs make use of a hierarchy already, and LDAP has a reputation of being very fast for reads. While writes are slower, this isn’t a very big deal (changing the default pagination or time zone for a deployment/user isn’t likely to be a very frequent thing), yet these configs are going to be hit up many times a second (our app servers are going to be working with a single tree of code that serves a very large number of deployments, and each “view” on the app server might be for a different deployment, database and user).
If you’ve got any suggestions or comments to make, feel free to add them to my question at StackOverflow.
