It is no secret that we use Mattermost at Faelix — after all, it is a product we already support to be able to offer it to our customers. And like many network operators we use Oxidized to track and log changes to our routers and switches, even when those changes are made by automation tools.

As part of our move to using more ChatOps within the business I wanted to get visibility of network changes within our network operations channel in Mattermost. A quick and dirty script achieved this.

MooseFS offered all the features we were looking for — storing millions of files, and planning for GDPR requirements — and seemed to have a much simpler deployment process than Ceph:

• redundancy (potentially with erasure coding)
• snapshots
• tiered storage
• one node at a time upgrades

We wanted to take advantage of the tiered storage so that our clients would be served their data from as close as possible — in our case we wanted to ensure we had a full copy of customer data in at least two datacentres, separated by ~20ms RTT. It was quite easy to do build our mfsmount.cfg file to accommodate this by tweaking mfsprefslabels based on pillar data in our Salt States.

fulcrm is our configuration management database, our customer relationship management system, our billing platform, and our go-to source for network documentation.

We've built something using SaltStack and Debian Linux to help us deploy and administer at scale the servers we provide for our part- and fully-managed hosting customers.