Understanding Nomad Clusters: Architecture, Configuration, and the Raft Algorithm

HashiCorp Nomad is a versatile workload orchestrator that enables organizations to deploy and manage applications across a distributed infrastructure. It is designed to handle a wide range of workloads, from long-running services to batch jobs, and is known for its simplicity, flexibility, and scalability. In this article, we will delve into the architecture of a Nomad cluster, discuss the recommended number of servers, explore the concept of failure domains, and provide an overview of the Raft consensus algorithm that underpins Nomad’s high availability.

Building a Resilient Consul Cluster: Best Practices and Insights

In the world of modern DevOps, ensuring high availability and reliability of services is paramount. HashiCorp’s Consul is a powerful tool that provides service discovery, configuration management, and health checking capabilities. To leverage Consul effectively, understanding how to set up a resilient Consul cluster is crucial. This article delves into the best practices for setting up a Consul cluster, focusing on the number of servers, failure domains, and the Raft consensus algorithm.

Deploying a Nomad Cluster with Consul and Vault on 3 Nodes

Deploying a Nomad cluster integrated with Consul and Vault provides a robust and secure platform for orchestrating workloads. This article will guide you through setting up a three-node cluster, ensuring high availability and security for your applications. Prerequisites Before you begin, ensure you have: Three Linux-based servers (e.g., Ubuntu 20.04) with at least 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM each. SSH access to each server. Basic understanding of HashiCorp tools: Nomad, Consul, and Vault.

Writing Data from Prometheus to Mimir

In the world of cloud-native applications, monitoring and observability have become crucial components of maintaining system health and performance. Prometheus has emerged as a leading open-source solution for monitoring and alerting, offering a powerful query language and a robust ecosystem. However, as organizations scale, they often encounter limitations with Prometheus’s storage capabilities. This is where Mimir, an open-source project from Grafana Labs, comes into play. Mimir provides a horizontally scalable, multi-tenant, long-term storage solution for Prometheus metrics.

Writing Data from Prometheus to Thanos

In the world of cloud-native applications, monitoring and observability are crucial for maintaining the health and performance of your systems. Prometheus has become a go-to solution for monitoring due to its powerful querying capabilities and ease of use. However, as organizations scale, they often encounter challenges with Prometheus’s storage limitations. This is where Thanos comes into play, extending Prometheus’s capabilities by providing long-term storage, high availability, and global querying across multiple Prometheus instances.

Writing Data from Prometheus to Cortex

Prometheus has become a cornerstone in the world of monitoring and observability, offering a powerful and flexible platform for collecting and querying metrics. However, as organizations scale, they often encounter limitations with Prometheus’s local storage, such as retention constraints and high availability challenges. This is where Cortex comes into play. Cortex is an open-source, horizontally scalable, and highly available multi-tenant long-term storage for Prometheus. In this article, we’ll explore how to write data from Prometheus to Cortex, enabling you to leverage the strengths of both systems.

Useful Built-in Ansible Commands

Ansible is a powerful open-source automation tool that simplifies IT operations by automating configuration management, application deployment, and task automation. One of the reasons Ansible is so popular among DevOps professionals is its simplicity and the rich set of built-in commands that make it easy to manage complex IT environments. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most useful built-in Ansible commands that can help streamline your automation tasks.

Deploying HashiCorp Consul Using Ansible

HashiCorp Consul is a powerful tool for service discovery, configuration, and segmentation. Deploying Consul in a consistent and automated manner can significantly enhance your infrastructure’s reliability and scalability. In this article, we’ll walk through deploying Consul using Ansible, a popular open-source automation tool. We’ll create an Ansible role to streamline the deployment process, ensuring that Consul is installed and configured correctly across your infrastructure. Prerequisites Before we begin, ensure you have the following:

Deploying HashiCorp Nomad Using Ansible: A Step-by-Step Guide

HashiCorp Nomad is a flexible, easy-to-use cluster manager and scheduler designed to deploy and manage applications across both on-premises and cloud environments. Ansible, a powerful IT automation tool, can be used to automate the deployment of Nomad, ensuring a consistent and repeatable process. In this article, we will walk through the steps to deploy Nomad using Ansible, focusing on creating an Ansible role for this purpose. Prerequisites Before we begin, ensure you have the following:

Best Security Practices for HashiCorp Vault

HashiCorp Vault is a powerful tool for managing secrets and protecting sensitive data. As organizations increasingly rely on Vault to secure their infrastructure, it’s crucial to implement best security practices to ensure that your secrets remain safe. This article outlines some of the best practices for securing your HashiCorp Vault deployment. 1. Secure Installation and Configuration Use TLS for All Communications: Ensure that all communications with Vault are encrypted using TLS.

Creating Disk Byte Copies Using `dd`

In the world of DevOps and system administration, managing disk images and creating backups is a critical task. One of the most powerful and versatile tools available for this purpose on Unix-like systems is the dd command. This utility is often referred to as the “data duplicator” and is used for low-level copying and conversion of raw data. In this article, we’ll explore how to use dd to create byte-for-byte copies of disks, which can be invaluable for backup, cloning, and recovery operations.

Replacing the netstat Command with ss: A Modern Approach to Network Monitoring

In the world of network monitoring and troubleshooting, the netstat command has long been a staple for system administrators and DevOps engineers. However, as technology evolves, so do the tools we use. Enter ss, a modern alternative to netstat that offers more features, better performance, and a more user-friendly experience. In this article, we’ll explore why you should consider replacing netstat with ss and how to effectively use ss for your network monitoring needs.

Deploying HashiCorp Vault Using Ansible

HashiCorp Vault is a powerful tool for managing secrets and protecting sensitive data. Deploying Vault in a consistent and automated manner is crucial for maintaining a secure infrastructure. In this article, we will explore how to deploy HashiCorp Vault using Ansible, a popular open-source automation tool. We will create an Ansible role to streamline the deployment process, ensuring that Vault is installed and configured correctly on your infrastructure. Prerequisites Before we begin, ensure you have the following:

Building Your Own Self-Hosted Email Solution: Part One

In a world where privacy concerns are paramount, many organizations and individuals are looking for self-hosted email solutions to regain control over their data. By running your own mail server, you can mitigate risks associated with third-party providers, ensure compliance with data protection regulations, and tailor your email solution to meet your specific needs. This article will lay the groundwork for building a self-hosted email solution and cover the first steps of the process, focusing on the necessary components and considerations.

Understanding the Basics of Self-Healing Infrastructure

In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, ensuring that IT infrastructure remains operational and resilient is paramount. Self-healing infrastructure emerges as a critical paradigm, offering the ability to automatically detect faults and initiate corrective actions without human intervention. This article dives into the fundamental concepts of self-healing infrastructure, its benefits, and how to implement it effectively. What is Self-Healing Infrastructure? Self-healing infrastructure refers to systems designed to monitor their own health, detect anomalies or failures, and take corrective actions to restore optimal functionality.

Best Security Practices for Running Containers in Production

In the modern software ecosystem, containers have become the backbone for deploying applications at scale. They offer simplicity, consistency, and efficiency, making them a favorite for rapid delivery cycles. However, as with any technology, security is of paramount importance. Running containers in production demands robust security practices to protect sensitive data, ensure availability, and maintain trust. Here’s a guide to the best security practices for running containers in production environments.

Building a Self-Hosted Email Solution: Part Two - Configuration and Best Practices

In the first installment of our series on self-hosted email solutions, we covered the foundational elements and prerequisites needed for setting up your email server. In this article, we will delve deeper into the configuration of Postfix and Dovecot, essential components of a self-hosted email solution, along with best practices to ensure security and reliability. Overview of Postfix and Dovecot Postfix is a widely-used Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that routes and delivers email, while Dovecot is a flexible and high-performance IMAP and POP3 server.

OCR PDF Documents Using Tesseract Docker Image

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a powerful technology that converts different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, or images captured by a digital camera, into editable and searchable data. Tesseract is one of the most popular open-source OCR engines available today. In this article, we will explore how to use Tesseract within a Docker container to perform OCR on PDF documents. Why Use Docker for OCR? Docker provides a consistent environment for running applications, ensuring that the software behaves the same way regardless of where it is deployed.

Sending Notifications from Uptime Kuma to Telegram

Uptime Kuma is an open-source self-hosted status monitoring solution that allows you to track the uptime and performance of various services. It offers a user-friendly interface and provides multiple notification options to alert users when a service goes down or when certain conditions are met. One of the most popular ways to receive notifications is through Telegram, a robust messaging app that supports bot integration. In this article, we will walk through the setup process to send notifications from Uptime Kuma to Telegram.

Sending Notifications from Uptime Kuma to Slack

Monitoring services play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability of your applications and services. Uptime Kuma is an open-source self-hosted monitoring solution that provides an intuitive interface for monitoring the uptime of your services. One of its valuable features is the ability to send notifications, including those to the popular messaging platform Slack. This article will guide you through the steps to set up Uptime Kuma to send notifications to a Slack channel.