Archive for December, 2006

Building scalable systems

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

The testimonials page on the main FreeRADIUS web site contains an example of a carrier-class deployment of the server. Other large deployments of the server exist, of course, but this one was willing to publicise their use of FreeRADIUS.

From what they say, it looks like they have hundreds, if not thousands of devices at the edge. They have many machines at the core, all running FreeRADIUS and MySQL as application servers. They use LVS to do load balancing and failover. In short, they've built a system that handle thousands of sustained reads and writes per second, with near 100% uptime. Any piece can be upgraded while the system is “live”, without affecting uptime or stability.

That's a cool architecture, and from what else they've said, they don't seem to spend much time maintaining it. It Just Works.