At Crafty Penguins, we work with software development teams to automate their processes and infrastructure, so that they can deploy software updates at least daily instead of monthly or yearly, all the while maintaining a high level of up-time and security. The journey we take our clients on has six phases or markers along the…
Trickster is a reverse proxy cache for the Prometheus HTTP APIv1 that dramatically accelerates dashboard rendering times for any series queried from Prometheus. See our previous post about Why we Love Grafana and Prometheus. We are always super impatient so love cool things like Trickster. Dashboards that automatically refresh should now load on average 90% faster. Oh yeah!…
Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD for short) has tons of potential! Watch Kelsey Hightower deliver an awesome presentation on Kubernetes via several demos during his keynote talk on the KubeCon 2017:
Continuous improvement and continuous development (CI/CD) is a landmark of solid Linux and DevOps work, specifically in Kubernetes and Jenkins. The key here is to create automated tools around the process of failure detection (at Crafty Penguins, we refer to this as “failing fast!”) Too often, we see that it takes too long to get…
Kubernetes is all the rage right now for several reasons: It’s the industry standard for deploying containers in production, it’s the new go-to in managing virtualized infrastructure, developers seem to love it, and it can run any containerized application (thanks to Cynthia Harvey for organizing these thoughts). The basic architecture of Kubernetes is very cool and defines…
Richard has created a page explaining how we solve the “It Works For Me!” problem for developers, using the illustration of ships and barnacles. Read more….
Recently we worked with an amazing biotech client on an initiative to shutdown internal self-hosted systems and move all services to “the cloud”. The client requested that we convert a virtual appliance (basically a regular Linux install) to a standard Docker image. The docker images would then be run on Kubernetes on either Google Kubernetes…
Want to know the CPU use of a container in a Kubernetes node three months from now? Want custom alerts based on thresholds or failures? Prometheus has you covered, with its powerful time series database. Here are some of the top reasons we love it: Works on everything. Different exporters allow you to gather CPU, Memory,…
Knowing what went wrong in the event of a failure is incredibly important. Elasticsearch provides storage for log level events across systems, creating a reliable and redundant way to store, search, and query critical system events. Here are the top reasons we use it: Open source and well documented. Elasticsearch has a great community of…
With many diverse server systems to deploy, configure, and maintain for our clients, it is important to have a Managed Configuration and Orchestration platform. There are many different systems in this space like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, and Salt Stack. We use and have used many of them, but the preferred system that we love…
