A Love Letter to Servers: Linux, Load Balancers, and the Architecture of Uptime

Summary

Transcript

Jason Kikta:

Hello and welcome to Automox's CISO IT podcast. I'm your host, Jason Kikta. And today we're going to be talking about servers. This is a server month here at Automox and that's a place near and dear to my heart because, know, as long as I've been using computers on the internet, servers have always been something of a fascination of mine because, you know, they, they're obviously critical to storing and transmitting, distributing data, maintaining things. there's such a broad variety and diversity of what a server can be. 

You can run a server, as in server software, on any computer. It can be running on an endpoint and thinking about like, certain scenarios of like, what's the client and what's the server when you're talking about like a remote control session and it's backwards where the administrator is going into a user machine and the user is acting as the server in that instance. But then, you know, maybe that's running over a security tunnel where a remote platform is the server and the workstation as a client. You know, just I love that sort of thing. It's so much fun to think through scenarios like that.

And then, you you pile on top of that, the drastic changes in what servers have become over time. Just in my career of, you know, when I started with servers, you know, the server was the Novell Netware box in the corner that was, you know, it was a big tower like that, but twice as tall. And it was this big, massive white hunk of junk that, you know, probably weighed 50 pounds and had so many whirring fans. then, you know, later on we had the, you know, the, the wide one unit, two unit form factors that were rack mountable. And, know, then along came virtualization and then the cloud. then, you know, again, what is a server? What do you mean when you say server became almost a philosophical question. So that's been a really exciting journey to watch as a technologist to see that change in that variety and all the different ways that we can reimagine like what does a server mean and what is its impact on my application or on my network or what I'm trying to achieve. 

And I think they're just they're an underappreciated part of our ecosystem in a sense, you know, not because people don't know that servers are important. I think everyone understands that, you know, servers are critical to the modern internet, to modern day business operations. And I don't think anyone doubts that for a moment. But I think where they're sometimes underappreciated is the special care and handling it takes to make a server stay up to have it be able to service almost incomprehensible number of requests, at least for the human mind, you know, thousands of connections per second, or to have a bank of servers sitting side by side behind a load balancer and have them pretend to be one server perceived as one server. 

And then how do you think about maintenance for all those things of taking it out of the rotation, the load balancer and shutting down all the services cleanly and, know, applying patches or doing whatever maintenance you need to do on the, on the system and, then validating that afterwards that it's back in a good state and then bring the services back up and validating all those services and then re adding it to the load balancer and then making sure it's appropriately, you know, serving requests so that you can then move on to the next one. Like managing servers is just very characteristically different than managing other endpoints in the network. 

And it's always fascinating to see how the techniques and methodology has changed over time and how people have innovated in terms of hardware and software and it's just, you know, like I said, it has a special place in my heart and I think it's a little underappreciated just how complex it is. And so that's why I'm happy that it's Server Month. you know, another thing I think that we tend to, you know, not think about a lot is what does it mean as far as operating systems and how it's really advanced Linux. know, when I, when I learned about Linux, God, 25 years ago, but when I first started playing with Linux, I honestly always thought that, you know, I was one of the first people to buy into like, it's the year of Linux on the desktop.

I had my Mandrake CDs and I'm like, yeah, like I use this on my desktop and I have it my gaming computer and you know, I can dual boot into Mandrake and this is so neat. know, soon we'll all be using this as our desktop operating system. And, you know, every year was that was almost almost the year of Linux on the desktop and the Linux community was going to crack the code. But Linux is probably one of the most popular operating systems on the planet.

And it's not because of desktops, it's because of servers, right? the, you know, obviously the price point of free, was deeply compelling, but you know, where it really came into its own was, know, those Unix like qualities of everything's a file and, and, you know, just very easy to set up the processes and to tune it to really finely tune it down to

Only what you need, nothing you don't. Those were like deeply meaningful things at a time when we were beginning to stand up all this cloud-based infrastructure and, you know, sort of rethink as an industry what we wanted out of our servers. so the, the fact that Linux ultimately succeeded didn't surprise me, but the fact that it was in the server space, it's something that had been dominated by, you know, true blue Unix and even Windows to an extent for so long, especially when you're talking like small office, you know, it was all Windows NT back in the day, no one was going to buy Solaris for smaller office, you know, to see that transition and to see Linux become the dominant force there has been just just fascinating to watch. And I think it's been inherently good for Linux because

When you operate, this is a lesson, by the way, that I've learned here at Automox is, you know, when you have a lot of server customers and server endpoints that you're trying to service, you have to mature and you have to mature quickly. And you have to really think through what your engineering principles are and how you are testing.

And you have to just be very much on your game every day because servers are a can't fail mission. A user falls offline for a few minutes. Yeah, maybe not a big deal, but a server falls offline. That is problematic. You know, that can be a massive disruption to business because again, you know, a computer, a user workstation or laptop, that's one user, a server could be thousands or tens of thousands of people depending on what it's doing. And if you ever need proof of that, just watch whatever happens when DNS goes awry. And I think that's a great example of the critical role that servers play every day. yeah, this is my my a little bit of a love letter to servers and how fascinating they are and how much I think that, you know, understanding really their journey up to this point and thinking about where they're headed in the future and all the possibilities that presents to us is something that all of us should take a little time out and do this month. 

So thank you so much for tuning in and I will see you next time.