Re: Guix orchestration notes

[Thompson, David]

Hi Chris,

On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 11:37 PM, Chris Marusich <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At FOSDEM, some of us discussed "orchestration", which means something
> like "how to deploy services to more than 1 machine in a coordinated
> fashion".  Many people contributed to the discussion.  I took notes.
> I've thought about this more, reviewed the "wip-deploy" branch, and
> written up my thoughts in the attached file.
>
> It's a rough sketch of ideas, biased with my own opinions and
> experience, but I think it's good enough to share.  I invite you to
> improve upon it: share your own thoughts, hack some code together, and
> just iterate on this a bit, so we can make some progress.
>
> Hopefully, we can agree on a basic design and get a working proof of
> concept.  Then we can make a blog post about it!

These are good notes, thanks for sharing them!

One additional use-case I would consider for an orchestration tool
would be so-called "immutable deployment", where virtual machines are
replaced entirely rather than updated in-place. This is commonly used
for deploying web applications into auto scaling groups (where the
actual number of hosts at any given time is dynamic) using a
"blue-green" deployment technique (in a nutshell it's a double buffer
that allows updating the application without downtime and allows easy
rollback in the event the deploy breaks critical functionality).  This
is the kind of thing that I do at my day job, and we are but one of
many companies that do things this way.

- Dave