IBM

Brian is a Senior Technical Staff Member and has been at IBM since 2001. His focus is on the development side. His counterpart, Rich, is a software engineer whose focus in on the infrastructure side. He’s been at IBM since 1989. Brian set the stage by describing the team’s two overriding concerns. “Our focus is on continuous availability. You should always be able to get to our web sites. Continuous availability is the lens by which we examine all our technical decisions. “Also, our business is different from most because we have hard deadlines. Things don’t slip for us. A lot of our priorities are driven by that fact. You can’t push back and say, ‘Sorry, you’ll have to move the US Open to a couple days later.’ That doesn’t work. I’ve tried.”

The IBM event cloud

The IBM cloud that the events team uses is, in fact, a hybrid cloud. Some of their workloads run in the public cloud, on SoftLayer, while others run in the private cloud, which is based on OpenStack. Currently, AIX makes up a large part of the infrastructure, along with SUSE Linux and Red Hat Linux. However, going forward, the team has decided to support a single platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). They are gradually moving their systems over, and bringing them under Chef management as they do so. Their development workstations are a mix of Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu and OSX.

The overall environment is complex. There is a test environment, a pre-production environment, which consists of two separate locations, and a production environment, which consists of seven locations. Each production location is treated separately. It’s not unusual to take a cloud location down for a week or even two weeks at a time, or to keep it at an older version, while the web site itself is always available.