Infrastructure and Operations

I attended DevOps Days Paris, for which Octo was a sponsor, on April 14 and 15. Here's a small synthesis of the various talks I attended, and the one I presented. DevOps Days are mostly focused on the human side of DevOps, and therefore featured a lot of non-technical talks on the subject. The talks emphasized the importance of empathy and respect, of understanding peoples fears and wants, and of putting yourself in other's shoes. There was also a strong focus on challenging our assumptions…

We've been discussing a lot about Docker as a mean to build and expose Web applications, here is another way to use it as a native distribution package building tool. You want to product deb and rpm package for applications written in Ruby, Nodes.js, Python... These technologies usually rely on specific packaging tools which need internet to work (gem for Ruby, npm for Node.js, pip or easy_install for Python). Having a compiling chain or an internet access on a production server is bad for security reason so you must use a…

OS choice for a VM in cloud is usually between the old bare metal's one : Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS. They are doing the job but I'm pretty sure the can job can be done in a better way. Isn't there a more suitable OS for VMs in a Cloud environment ?

If you've started using Docker for a while you might be asking the same question «how to manage a group of Docker containers into a consistent topology?».

As we saw in the previous post, Docker basic usage seems pretty simple. Let's try to dig a little deeper into the configuration management. From an OPS perspective, we can consider containers as application black boxes, without caring about how they are built, and simply use them. However there are several aspects of a container that must be configured to ensure their correct integration in an information system.

Here at Octo, we are fond of Docker. Not because we completely master it, but because we don't (yet). And as DevOps-minded guys, we like new perspectives in Dev / Ops relationship. Docker is mainly about this, shifting each other's expectation. Now that the 0.7 and 0.8 releases are out, its production readiness has never been closer and it's getting pretty exciting. In a previous article, we've answered a few questions allowing to understand the basic concepts of Dockers, let's play around with few Docker…

After talking a while with few co-workers about Docker versus LXC and regular VMs, it appeared that a few questions and answers could help people understand the concepts and their main differences.

You are reading this article, so it’s likely that you are a geek who loves to test software products and make complex infrastructure mocks like an OpenStack cloud. Seeing four or five desktops stacked in your living room doesn’t make your wife happy. Right? Your dream is to have a very monolithic machine made of several motherboards, switch, disks, power supply, DVD reader and network cards. It was also my dream, and once I decided to turn it to reality. In fact it was a…

Ok, you have decided to setup a Hadoop cluster for your business. Next step now, planning the cluster… But Hadoop is a complex stack and you might have many questions: HDFS deals with replication and Map Reduce create files… How can I plan my storage needs? How to plan my CPU needs? How to plan my memory needs? Should I consider different needs on some nodes of the cluster? I heard that Map Reduce moves its job code where the data to process is located……

Deploying an HTTP cache in front of web servers is a good way to improve performances. This post has two goals : present the basics of HTTP Caching present the new features I have implemented in the Memcached Nginx module to simplify HTTP caching