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A few weeks ago, I have moved to a new company as Linux system administrator, they are going to start a project of moving production servers infrastructure from a data center to Amazon AWS.

They are following the concept of "our traffic drive our system design"; which means as well as the server is not overloaded we can use it to provide multiple services, also even if one service like RabbitMQ is not overloaded it can be used by two different applications as well as this will not cause any conflict. Well, this architect worked fine for the last four years serving million of users a day, and they are going to use it in the new infrastructure.

I believe in "our system design should drive our traffic"; which means a group of servers should be designed to serve only one application even if it's not overloaded, and one database should serve only one application, that will help in debugging any future issue, haveing separate logs of each application and clean architect. But they believe this will cost more money and need more maintenance with no added value.

So, should our traffic drive our system design or our system design drive our traffic?

Clarifying that will help me follow the correct path, either follow their way or finding good reasons for them to follow mine.

Jubba Smail
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In smaller environments it is cost effective to have multiple services running on a lesser number of servers.

When handling larger volumes it is easier from an administration perspective to have services more segregated as you are able to quickly identify, contain and resolve problems with the narrower playing field.

Placing these applications into a Container (think Docker) environment will also give you the ability to change the number of containers and hence the number of connections you can service as you need. This can be done on the google compute engine with rules and I believe this is the same as Amazons EC2 Container service, I have not used AWS so I can't say for sure though.

Dave Farley
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  • well, we already have more than 50 servers in production, each server may have multiple roles at the same time. so what do you think ? – Jubba Smail Feb 18 '16 at 06:05
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    You are asking me to speculate on your environment without the details. There may be reasons why some servers host multiple roles maybe not, you are the best person to analyse your current situation and hence come up with a satisfactory solution. Whilst I am happy to give my two cents this is becoming rather opinion based and everyone will have a different view on how to do it. In short produce your case and back it up with your findings is the only thing you can do. – Dave Farley Feb 22 '16 at 00:28