The state of Orchestrator, 2020 (spoiler: healthy)

Yesterday was my last day at GitHub, and this post explains what this means for orchestrator. First, a quick historical review:

• 2014: I began work on orchestrator at Outbrain, as https://github.com/outbrain/orchestrator. I authored several open source projects while working for Outbrain, and created orchestrator to solve discovery, visualization and simple refactoring needs. Outbrain was happy to have the project developed as a public, open source repo from day 1, and it was released under the Apache 2 license. Interestingly, the idea to develop orchestrator came after I attended Percona Live Santa Clara 2014 and watched “ChatOps: How GitHub Manages MySQL” by one Sam Lambert.
• 2015: Joined Booking.com where my main focus was to redesign and solve issues with the existing high availability setup. With Booking.com’s support, I continued work on orchestrator, pursuing better failure detection and recovery processes. Booking.com was an incredible playground and testbed for orchestrator, a massive deployment of multiple MySQL/MariaDB flavors and configuration.
• 2016 – 2020: Joined GitHub. GitHub adopted orchestrator and I developed it under GitHub’s own org, at https://github.com/github/orchestrator. It became a core component in github.com’s high availability design, running failure detection and recoveries across sites and geographical regions, with more to come. These 4+ years have been critical to orchestrator‘s development and saw its widespread use. At this time I’m aware of multiple large-scale organizations using orchestrator for high availability and failovers. Some of these are GitHub, Booking.com, Shopify, Slack, Wix, Outbrain, and more. orchestrator is the underlying failover mechanism for vitess, and is also included in Percona’s PMM. These years saw a significant increase in community adoption and contributions, in published content, such as Pythian and Percona technical blog posts, and, not surprisingly, increase in issues and feature requests.

2020

GitHub was very kind to support moving the orchestrator repo under my own https://github.com/openark org. This means all issues, pull requests, releases, forks, stars and watchers have automatically transferred to the new location: https://github.com/openark/orchestrator. The old links do a “follow me” and implicitly direct to the new location. All external links to code and docs still work. I’m grateful to GitHub for supporting this transfer.

I’d like to thank all the above companies for their support of orchestrator and of open source in general. Being able to work on the same product throughout three different companies is mind blowing and an incredible opportunity. orchestrator of course remains open source and licensed with Apache 2. Existing Copyrights are unchanged.

As for what’s next: some personal time off, please understand if there’s delays to reviews/answers. My intention is to continue developing orchestrator. Naturally, the shape of future development depends on how orchestrator meets my future work. Nothing changes in that respect: my focus on orchestrator has always been first and foremost the pressing business needs, and then community support as possible. There are some interesting ideas by prominent orchestrator users and adopters and I’ll share more thoughts in due time.