Nio’s Weblog

Lazy Linux: 11 secrets for lazy cluster admins

Cluster means different things to different people. In the context of this article, cluster is best defined as scale-out — scale-out clusters generally have a lot of the same type of components like Web farms, render farms, and high performance computing (HPC) systems. Administrators will tell you that with scale-out clusters any change, no matter how small, must be repeated up to hundreds of thousands of times; the laziest of admins have mastered techniques of scale-out management so that regardless of the number of nodes, the effort is the same. In this article, the authors peer into the minds of the laziest Linux® admins on Earth and divulge their secrets.

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The secrets are
1. Don't reinvent the wheel.
2. Use open source.
3. Automate everything.
4. Design for scale - plan to be lazy from the start.
5. Design for hardware manageability.
6. Use good cluster management software - don't dig wells with teaspoons.
7. Use open source monitoring solutions.
8. Control your users with a queuing system.
9. Verify you get what you pay for - benchmark it!
10. Manage cluster communication.
11. Look for ways to become lazier.