I wanted a simple way to have a dashboard to show if hosts and services are alive & didn’t want to write much code and/or run up a nagios instance (or anything like that). All I care is whether it’s green or red. I’d already been setting up HAProxy for a proxy forwarder, so I …
Category Archive: infrastructure
Apr 25
Rules for Operations
The following list was compiled in 2012 for a talk on Operations Principles for Developers (Ops4Devs). They are loosely inspired by the list of rules from Zombieland as well as from my experiences and those shared by others. Looking over the list four years later, I believe that they are still (very) applicable for all …
Sep 12
Minimum Viable Configuration (a mini saga)
Too many believe that bigger is better; elaborate systems, multitude layers, and diverse architectural patterns demonstrate a maturity of design. Unfortunately they aren’t called at 3am when it breaks. I prefer the simplicity of less — kissing Occam’s razor; trimming away until perfection… when there is nothing left to take away.
Apr 07
Swarming Raspberry Pi: Of Network Bondage
Apologies to W. Somerset Maugham for the title. For my Cloud in a Box, I want the Data hosts, at the least to have “more” network I/O capability, whether it be for a Docker Registry or other data. (As an aside, I am playing with doing substructure matching of chemical compounds and/or other Cheminformatics with …
Dec 18
Using Docker Registry with Riak-CS
Intro As a proof of concept, this uses the docker hectcastro/riak-cs container to create the riak-cs cluster. Some flavour of linux with a recent Docker version is assumed. Riak-CS Pull the github repository; it has a Makefile and scripts to bring up the cluster and test it. It can set up a haproxy container in …
Nov 14
Free Cloud Resources
This is a quick list of “free” cloud resources. Mirantis Openstack Express (Developer) Rackspace Developer + Google Cloud Platform Trial Openshift Free Elephant Postgres (free) Redis Cloud ClearDB (mysql) Stackato Cluster (up to 20GB)
Aug 01
Cloudy Update
I’ve been working with Docker a good bit and have updated my list of tools. Here’s a quick dump of where I am in the design of the infrastructure. collectd will be used to monitor cgroup statistics. This necessitates compiling all or part of collectd — the current packages do not contain the cgroup plugin. …
