Bangalore Configuration Management Meetup Group- (First Meetup- March-02-14)

We had our first CM meetup today at the Square Cafe Coffee Day; We booked a Huddle room for this meetup. It is well equipped with projector, wifi etc. Few folks have RSVPed yes but as expected they did not turn up :) but anyway we had a great session. There were only four of us for the first meetup. Participants: 
1) Bernard L'Allier- RackSpace Inc 
2) Roopesh Kumar- Streamnet Cloud 
3) Krishna Gowda- Streamnet Cloud 
4) Subhankar Sengupta- Sabre Inc.    

We waited for 15 minutes for others to join and then finally started by 2.30 PM. After the introduction was over, I did a presentation about "Configuration Management as a Practice". This was more about looking at the whole picture of CM practice and not just System/Service provisioning and deployment. Spoke more about the control tier API. Control tier includes Orchestration, Dispatcher and Scheduler. Then covered the provisioning tier with example of Puppet/Chef/Salt etc. Touched upon importance of version control and artifact repo for infrastructure configuration components. After that Bernanrd shared his insight about the CM practice in Rackspace and specifically discussed few case studies for CM. Apart from that Bernard shared his vision for Rackspace in India with us. Roopesh and Krishna shared how CM practice with a introduction of tool like puppet/chef could make their support echo system more effective. 

Finally we did a Live Workshop on Puppet and we covered following topics (Hands-On) -
1) Puppet Installation.....
2) Puppet Directory Structure....
3) Apache Deployment with Puppet...
3) Script Deployment with Puppet...
Meetup ended in a very positive note and all of us took good amount of learning back home :) We decided to meetup again in near future (Date will be announced) and will uphold our promise :)- No Sponsor, Zero Marketing, Strictly Open Source and Vendor Agnostic :)

Apache and Nginx

I recently came across a blog  that says Nginx performance is better than Apache because, “Nginx doesn’t create a new process for a new request. Apache creates a new process for each request” This is not completely true, Apache MPM has two models, 1. Prefork (Above statement is applicable for this model) 2. Worker The worker MPM uses processes with many threads for each process. Each thread handles one connection at a time. This model is suitable for high performance web servers. I have not worked on Nginx and but managed high few high traffic website with Apache (Tuned) and lighthttpd quite well. I wanted to learn more about the performance advantage that Nginx has over Apache or lighthttpd. Is there any study/load testing done to prove Nginx could perform better than Apache (Tuned) for high traffic website? Please back your statement with data. (In Data we trust rest is ;)
In response to Event Driven Arch of Nginx

Agree Buddy :) Nginx is event driven and asynchronous from design perspective and I guess this very helpful for more requests that are long-running but of a small size (Example Mobile)
As ONESTONE says:
"Nginx uses the Reactor pattern. Basically, it's single-threaded (but can fork several processes to utilize multiple cores). The main event loop waits for the OS to signal a readiness event - e.g. that data is available to read from a socket, at which point it is read into a buffer and processed. The single thread can very efficiently serve tens of thousands of simultaneous connections (the thread-per-connection model would fail at this because of the huge context-switching overhead, as well as the large memory consumption, as each thread needs its own stack)"

But Apache has a fix around it- Event MPM (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/event.html)
As I know this fix is experimental and has issue with https :(
But again as per Kevin, Apache could outrun Nginx when "you are running pure PHP content on a given server, Apache seems to still be the best bet for the job."

http://www.eschrade.com/page/why-is-fastcgi-w-nginx-so-much-faster-than-apache-w-mod_php/

I would design this in following way,

* CDN (CSS, JS and images)

* Run PHP from Apache (Tuned)

Again as I mentioned before I don't know Nginx (Never worked on it) so idea is to LEARN and EVOLVE. Leverage Nginx when required and possible.
I never carry any preconceived notion/baggage of dogma :) just a student of life/events :)