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Cloud Builder - Systems Monkey - DevRel

LXD, OpenStack and cloud-init - Part 1

I’ve recently started playing with LXC containers, both on physical hardware and in the cloud. This blog is itself running in a LXC container running on a virtual machine in an OpenStack public cloud. One of my main interests was to understand what the different patterns look like for external network access to services running containerised like this. By default LXD will configure an internal bridge, with DNSmasq providing internal IP addresses to containers.

Unravelling Logs - Part 2

2016 UPDATE 🔗log-courier came into existence as a fork of the original logstash-forwarder, which had become fairly unmaintained, and didn’t support some features the community needed. Elastic have now introduced filebeat, which is probably the best way to do this now. I also never did manage to complete pt3 of this blog set, which was supposed to cover using Riemann for automated log file analysis. At the time we seemed to be one of the few people using it, and it’s a black art with config files written in Clojure.

Unravelling Logs - Part 1

Traditionally in enterprise IT environments, logs have tended to be used mainly for auditability purposes, and to enable post incident root cause analysis. Log collection is centralised if you’re lucky, and that in itself is regarded as a fairly major technical achievement. This kind of works OK when systems are mainly stand alone, and problems can be diagnosed from looking at an individual machine. Even in those situations though, logs tend to be the second point of call after an incident has already occurred and you’ve been notified about some failure from your service monitoring system – I’m sure many of us are familiar with the situation of investigating an outage, only to find that the machine involved had been logging partial failures for a long time without anyone noticing.