Most free software projects happen in a virtual environment, and build on a joint cooperation of many contributors worldwide, breaking barriers of language, culture and time zones - something that would have been unthinkable with the technology available 20 years ago. Essential to the success of any such free software project is a reliable and scalable infrastructure that grows with the community and scales based on its needs. Being one of the largest free software projects worldwide, the LibreOffice community was challenged with providing a professional infrastructure from the very first day. Following our principles, nearly all components solely rely on free and open source software. We not only build on third party components, but also develop many of our infrastructure tools on our own, and make them available to the worldwide community, while at the same time contributing to projects we make use of. This talk gives an overview on the infrastructure of the LibreOffice project and how it provides the playground the community and the software need to grow and flourish.

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Alexander Werner
The Document Foundation
LibreOffce Conference Bern
4 September 2014

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About Alex
A long long time of activity
for free software
Member of The Document Foundation
responsible for the project's infrastructure
as freelancer
Python enthusiast

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Looking into the engine room

4. 4
Controlled chaos
Own dedicated servers
Dedicated servers rented by others
Hosted services
Nginx
Apache
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Deployment on bare metal
VMs
UFW
Shorewall
Postfx
Mirrorbrain
Askbot
Plone
Silverstripe
Debian 7
Ubuntu 12.04
Amavisd
Mailman
Mlmmj
Saltstack
Owncloud
Mediawiki
Dovecot
Mirmon
Etherpad
Planet
Etc. pp.

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Jump to the next level

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Taming the chaos
Goals
High availability of services
Fewer services with the same purpose
Better maintainability
Better use of resources
Easier scalability

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Taming the chaos
Reaching the goals
High availability
Use current virtualization and storage technologies
Build a cloud-like infrastructure
Get better suited hardware
Fewer services with the same purpose
Find duplicate services
Choose the one that works best
Better maintainability
Reduce the number of different speced servers
Reduce confguration complexity

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Taming the chaos
Reaching the goals
Better use of resources
Software that needs less CPU/RAM
Looking for simpler confguration
Easier scalability
Get hardware that is suffcient for quite a number of VMs
Make use of an infrastructure/cloud provider

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Our new engine
64 cores
256GB RAM
4x2TB Enterprise Level SATA HDDs
Hardware RAID
Redundant power supply
Direct LAN connection between two of them
IPMI
enough IPs (both v4 and v6)

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The gearbox
oVirt as infrastructure provider
Provides virtual machines, virtual storage and virtual
networks
on top of CentOS 6.5
Running in self hosted engine mode – management
engine as VM
GlusterFS as replicated storage
Migration of VMs between hosts without downtime
KVM as virtualization technology

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Our chauffeur
SaltStack for infrastructure orchestration
One master commands multiple minions
Simple, yaml based confguration
Very fast and parallel
Bootstrapping of the whole platform possible
Setup of new VM (production ready) from scratch
within 20 minutes
Documentation of the confguration
Most parts open sourced (github.com/tdf/salt-states-base)

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The whole platform
Easy to give new admins fne-grained access due to salt-based user
management
Easy to maintain: changes to the salt-master propagate to the
whole infrastructure
Highly available: VMs failover to the other host
Effcient use of resources: VMs can scale very large, memory
overcommit included
It scales easily: VMs and additional hardware hosts can be easily
provisioned

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The masterplan

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What's next
Writing salt-states that provision the platform on testing hardware
Allocation of the hardware by the hoster
Provision the nodes
Move the existing VMs to the new platform, starting with the
staging ones
Move services from exisiting bare-metal machines to separated Vms
Change from Apache to Nginx, from MySQL to PGSQL etc.

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Join us, it's fun!
Infra confcall on Tuesday, September 9, 17:00 CET
Help appreciated in all areas
Virtualization
Backup
Monitoring
SSO
LDAP
Databases
Webserver
Mailserver

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Communication channels
#tdf-infra at irc.freenode.net
website@global.libreoffce.org mailing list
subscribe with website+subscribe@global.libreoffce.org
own wiki category at
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Infra
mail the admin team at
hostmaster@documentfoundation.org

17. All text and image content in this document, unless otherwise specifed, is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
This does not include the LibreOffce name, logo, or icon
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Thank you for your attention!
Any questions?
E-Mail: alex@documentfoundation.org
IRC: awerner