Infrastructure and Operations

A few months ago our friends Guillaume Lefevre and Etienne Coutaud made an appearance at the 2017 KubeCon to present their work on a monitoring solution based on Prometheus and Grafana. (The video can be found here) A bit over a month later, we faced a problem in production, the platform started to behave abnormally. The graphs showed bursts in metrics which was unusual and some people were wondering if a deployment could have changed something in the configuration and triggered the problem. Even if…

Hey everybody! After reading both the Kubernetes and Docker “How does it work?” series, I guess you can’t wait to transform your old-school infrastructure and put all your applications inside containers. Indeed, containers are a great way to make your applications portable and easy to deploy. Nevertheless, there is a subject we have not discussed yet: data persistence.

Magic has existed since the dawn of time. It has always been there, hidden in plain sight, making amazing things possible for those willing to open their eyes and harness its power. You can't remember the first time you used it, and yet it feels like you've never existed without it. You've obliterated endless armies of enemies by virtue of spells and enchantments, and you've also constructed awe-inspiring marvels from the ground up. As a result, you're renowned for your overwhelming powers in every single…

̛I had a Slack conversation with some friends from work (B, R and G) the other day. It went somewhat like this: B: “Hey, have you guys ever heard of ARA?” This was followed by 5 minutes of the deafening sound of contextualisation and Google searches by everyone on the channel. R: “Nope, but every piece of technology that could enable Ansible to catch up with PuppetDB/Board would be very much appreciated” G: “Reporting is cheating” (This statement makes way more sense in French) Me:…

Hey there! TL;DR I hacked another thing together, this time in order to install a highly available Docker Swarm cluster on CoreOS (yeah, Container Linux), using Ansible. The whole subject was way too long for a single article. Therefore, I’ve divided it into 5 parts. This is episode 5, regarding the actual implementation of the local cluster’s Worker nodes, using Vagrant, CoreOS and Ansible. If you want to try it: git clone https://github.com/sebiwi/docker-coreos.git cd docker-coreos make up You will need Ansible 2.2+, Docker, Vagrant and…

Hey there! TL;DR I hacked another thing together, this time in order to install a highly available Docker Swarm cluster on CoreOS (yeah, Container Linux), using Ansible. The whole subject was way too long for a single article. Therefore, I’ve divided it into 5 parts. This is episode 4, regarding the actual implementation of the local cluster’s Manager nodes, using Vagrant, CoreOS and Ansible. If you want to try it: git clone https://github.com/sebiwi/docker-coreos.git cd docker-coreos make up   You will need Ansible 2.2+, Docker, Vagrant…

Hey there! TL;DR I hacked another thing together, this time in order to install a highly available Docker Swarm cluster on CoreOS (yeah, Container Linux), using Ansible. The whole subject was way too long for a single article. Therefore, I’ve divided it into 5 parts. This is episode 3, regarding Swarm Service Discovery, Load Balancing and Security. If you want to try it: git clone https://github.com/sebiwi/docker-coreos.git cd docker-coreos make up You will need Ansible 2.2+, Docker, Vagrant and Molecule  

Hey there! TL;DR I hacked another thing together, this time in order to install a highly available Docker Swarm cluster on CoreOS (yeah, Container Linux), using Ansible. The whole subject was way too long for a single article. Therefore, I’ve divided it into 5 parts. This is episode 2, regarding Swarm networking. If you want to try it: git clone https://github.com/sebiwi/docker-coreos.git cd docker-coreos make up You will need Ansible 2.2+, Docker, Vagrant and Molecule

Redis is an in-memory database that I really love. It’s one of the rare technologies that make both devs and ops happy. For those who don't know Redis already, here is a small introduction. There are four main topologies of Redis, and each one has and uses different and incompatible features. Therefore, you need to understand all the trade-offs before choosing one. Here we go: Redis Standalone The old classic. One big bag of RAM. Scale vertically, easy as pie, no availability, no resilience. Pros:…

Hey there! TL;DR I hacked another thing together, this time in order to install a highly available Docker Swarm cluster on CoreOS (yeah, Container Linux), using Ansible. If you want to try it: git clone https://github.com/sebiwi/docker-coreos.git cd docker-coreos make up You will need Ansible 2.2+, Docker, Vagrant and Molecule