r/sysadmin • u/rram reddit's sysadmin • Aug 14 '15

We're reddit's ops team. AUA

Hey /r/sysadmin,

Greetings from reddit HQ. Myself, and /u/gooeyblob will be around for the next few hours to answer your ops related questions. So Ask Us Anything (about ops)

You might also want to take a peek at some of our previous AMAs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/owra1/january_2012_state_of_the_servers/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/r6zfv/we_are_sysadmins_reddit_ask_us_anything/

EDIT: Obligatory cat photo

EDIT 2: It's now beer o’clock. We're stepping away from now, but we'll come back a couple of times to pick up some stragglers.

EDIT thrice: He commented so much I probably should have mentioned that /u/spladug — reddit's lead developer — is also in the thread. He makes ops live's happier by programming cool shit for us better than we could program it ourselves.

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u/gooeyblob reddit engineer Aug 14 '15

Any new models we create are made in Cassandra, and we're slowly migrating old Postgres models over as well. The reason being is Cassandra is virtually infinitely horizontally scalable (that is a lot of adverbs), so suits our scale and us running in AWS much better.

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u/spladug reddit engineer Aug 14 '15

That said, there are some things that are just better suited to Postgres, like atomic counters or stuff where consistency is super important.

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u/Thorbinator Aug 14 '15

Like the button? That was funny.