Jens Frank wrote:
What about sticking the entire cluster on private IP's and having a load balancing firewall appliance handle traffic flow which would randomly hit the update box?
I think Nick is trying to have a global cluster, and you can not achieve this with a simple load balancer. If one data center goes down, the load balancer would go down, too.
That's right. Nick's proposal, though, solves a problem that we don't actually have. It is of course possible for an entire data center to go down, but it's extremely rare and should be close to the bottom of our list of problems to solve.
The much more likely scenario -- one that we live with every day -- is that a single webserver will fall over. After we get that problem solved, with a load balancing firewall appliance basically, linuxvirturalserver.org stuff, then we can also consider such things as global clustering and locating servers all over the planet or whatever.
--Jimbo