One of the cool things about Orbital from my point of view is that I’m not just responsible for putting together a bit of software that runs on a web server, but also for designing the reference platform which you run those bits of software on.
At this point I could digress into discussing exactly what boxes we’re running Orbital on top of, but that doesn’t really matter. What is more interesting is how the various servers click together into building the complete Orbital platform, and how those servers can help us scale and provide a resilient service.
You’re probably used to thinking of most web applications like this:
It’s simple. You install what you need to run your application on a server, hook it up to the internet, and off you go. Everything is contained on a single box which gives you epic simplicity benefits and is often a lot more cost efficient, but you lose scalability. If one day your application has a traffic spike your Serv-O-Matic 100 may not be able to cope. The solution is to make your server bigger!
This is all well and good, until you start to factor in resiliency as well. Your Serv-O-Matic 500 may be sporting 16 processor cores and 96GB of RAM, but it’s only doing it’s job until the OS decides it’s going to fall over, or your network card gives up, or somebody knocks the Big Red Switch.