The plan

One of Redpill Linpro’s customers - had parts of their web presence managed by another provider - “P”. The customer wanted to migrate the server operations to Redpill Linpro (“RL”), including moving their Elasticsearch cluster to Redpill Linpro’s Elasticsearch offering, preferably without downtime. While exporting and importing by using snapshots was an option, the better option would be a live migration.

Elasticsearch A really useful Elasticsearch feature is the capability ... [continue reading]

As we saw in the introduction to ActiveMQ Artemis post, in ActiveMQ Artemis the implementation is separated from the configuration and data, requiring one to create a broker instance after installation of the implementation. One of the advantages of doing this, is that it makes upgrades much easier. Lets take a detailed look at that now.

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Apache ActiveMQ is a modern, open source messaging platform. For years now, the community has been working on the successor to the venerable ActiveMQ - now sometimes referred to as ActiveMQ classic.

The new project is named ActiveMQ Artemis, at least until the time that it will be re-branded as ActiveMQ 6.0. Apparently that will happen once ActiveMQ Artemis has all features of ActiveMQ, but since no one knows if and when this feature parity is achieved lets take a look at ActiveMQ Artemis - the future of the ActiveMQ project.

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This is not the place to tell anyone why Infrastructure as Code is a good idea. For that I can point the potential readers to a blog by my colleague Yngve about that: Why code your infrastructure?

I a short series of blogs, I intend to demonstrate building infrastructure in AWS in steps, where I will be building upon previous entries. Basic knowledge of network and VPC is assumed.

Note that following these instructions can and will incur costs ... [continue reading]

I’m sure everybody is aware you can have PostgreSQL fetch data live across the internet (or locally of course) as part of your queries and use the data directly. In fact there are a large number of drivers available to access different kinds of data for download. But in the simplest case, we can also just use the file_fdw wrapper that’s included in the standard PostgreSQL packages, together with everybody’s http-swiss-army-knife, curl.

In attempting to ... [continue reading]

Why Machine Learning models should run in Containers

Machine Learning (ML) is being implemented to varying extents in businesses all over. However, seamlessly integrating ML workflows into existing infrastructure can be somewhat challenging. This is the first article in a series on DevOps for Machine Learning - how to automate the ML process. In this chapter we will explore the benefits of running ML models as micro-services and with what tools.

Why containers in the first place?

The initial demand for this solution came years ago. Software ... [continue reading]

Is your data green enough?

Companies that opt to delay sustainable priorities over the next five years will find it impossible to catch up as sustainable business continues ... [continue reading]

When we introduced the network configuration using Ansible and AWX at a customer, we gradually extended the configuration scope. Over time, more and more configuration got added into the configuration pool and this lead to longer and longer run-times for the playbooks.

While the job-execution got really simple by using AWX instead of the plain CLI method for Ansible, the time to finish drew heavily on that benefit.

A complete job-run over the network infrastructure took at least ... [continue reading]

We’ve been to FOSDEM in Belgium this year. A couple of Many of Redpill’s Agents (so called: Consultants) have made the trip to Belgium to join the annual conference taking place at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

This year the conference was held during the first weekend in February, at the 1st and 2nd.

For those who don’t know: FOSDEM is a free software developer conference where you can attend talks about various different tools, processes and ideas and ... [continue reading]

While the AWS console gives you a nice point and click interface, and really helps you explore the vast service catalog of AWS, the use of the CLI should not be neglected.

Some of the advantages of the CLI:

  • Reusable, can the same command multiple times, perhaps with slight modification for quickly creating multiple instances of similar resources.
  • Reproducible, can run the same command, to reproduce exactly the same kind of resource as has been created before.
  • ... [continue reading]