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Google Gets Slack with Software Updates

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the showing-off-your-toys dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While Google's open source project titled 'Slack' was released over a year ago, last week's Australian Unix Users Group Conference marks the first time that Google has ever discussed the system in public. Corporate systems administrator Michael Still helped to illuminate a little bit about how Google uses Slack and how their network of computers fits together. From the article: '"Slack is a source deployment system and it's the way we install applications on servers," Still said, adding Slack is based around a centralized configuration repository which is then deployed onto selected machines in a "pull" method. Each of the "worker" machines asks for its new configuration regularly or when a manual command is run.'"

3 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense by frosty_tsm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Google has what, 700,000 servers? I would imagine that along the way they would have found existing solutions inadequate. Now they are making a version of their tool available other developers.

  2. Sounds similar to our setup by nsanders · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We run Ubuntu in my department and ended up building an in-house Apt repository/svn/rsync system to maintain all our machines. We also use custom scripts that monitor NFS shares to emergency push operations. Obviously our down side is that an entire .deb package must be rebuilt for each change, but it's nice to see Google's method isn't out of this world after all.

  3. Not new by HavokDevNull · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sounds very much like CFEngine http://www.cfengine.org/ with subversion?

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