Choria Blog

The Choria Server is the agent component of the Choria Orchestrator system, it runs on every node and maintains a connection to the middleware.

Traditionally we’ve configured it using Puppet along with its mcollective compatibility layer. We intend to keep this model for the foreseeable future. Choria Server though has many more uses – it’s embeddable so can be used in IoT, tools like our go-backplane, side cars in kubernetes in more. In these and other cases the Puppet model do not work:

• You do not have CM at all
• You do not own the machines where Choria runs on, you provide a orchestration service to other teams
• You are embedding the Choria Server in your own code, perhaps in a IoT device where Puppet does not make sense
• Your scale makes using Puppet not an option
• You wish to have very dynamic decision making about node placement
• You wish to integrate Choria into your own Certificate Authority system

In all these cases there are real complex problems to solve in configuring Choria Server. We’ve built a system that can help solve this problem, it’s called the Choria Server Provisioner and this post introduce it.

I’ve been saying for a while now my aim with Choria is that someone can get a 50 000 node Choria network that just works without tuning, like, by default that should be the scale it supports at minimum.

I started working on a set of emulators to let you confirm that yourself – and for me to use it during development to ensure I do not break this promise – though that got a bit side tracked as I wanted to do less emulation and more just running 50 000 instances of actual Choria, more on that in a future post.

Today I want to talk a bit about a actual 50 000 real nodes deployment and how I got there – the good news is that it’s terribly boring since as promised it just works.