October 27, 2010

Eat your own dog food

Yeah, that's what we're doing, eating our own dog food.

We just migrated our Plastic SCM internal server from an old Fedora Core 4 (yes, that oold... but is our server and we love it!) running on x86 hardware (Xeon) to a SPARC Solaris 10 box. A big endian 64 bits SPARC box!! :)



The previous configuration was running Mono + Bohem GC and Plastic storage was an external Oracle database (yes, separate Plastic and database servers, again, eating our own stuff), and now the configuration is as follows:

  • SPARC Solaris 10 server
  • Mono 2.8 + sgen (yes, sgen!!!)
  • Plastic SCM 3.0.7+ (internal build, not out yet)
  • SQL Server 2005 external database (yes, no make things even funnier we're using a little-endian db :P with a bigendian system, in fact we found a bug in our GUID conversion code while reusing the old db, something that wouldn't happen if you create your dbs with the bigendian server, would only happen if you plug 'old' databases created by littleendian boxes to it).

    So far the old iron is behaving really well, it's only been one day in real production (after weeks of load testing and so on, of course) but no known issues yet. It's not as fast as our previous server but that's because we're not using very strong hardware. I'd like to see it working on a beat like this.

    Although obviously SPARC hardware is not the most demanded at all, we're committed to support it since specially big customers tend to ask for at least a few servers running it... It's been supported for years already but now we're really about to have better packaging and so on, I expect to have an installer on the coming weeks (so far we installed manually).

    Will let you know how it goes... :P

    • 2 comments:

    1. David MApril 20, 2011 at 5:19 AM

      It's great to see companies 'eating their own dog food.' I just read a post by Dan Barnett about him doing the same thing: http://admin.worketc.com/Blogs/Development/69

      I think it adds a ton of credibility to any organization that eats their own dogfood. Employees instantly have an empathy towards customer frustration and a better knowledge of the software in general, while at the same time it gives insight into any possible issues facing a system - it's like free testing!

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    2. Pablo SantosApril 20, 2011 at 2:15 PM

      Thanks David M.

      Yes, in fact that's something we do on a daily basis, although we're very fortunate because we're developers using our own development tool. I mean, "eating your own's dog food" is probably not that easy when you're developing business software, for instance, in fact, it isn't! :)

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