Author: Minto Joseph

Cloud functions allow you to run single-purpose functions without having to manage instances in Google Cloud. Cloud SQL is Google Cloud’s managed SQL service. For better security, it’s best practice to disable public IP in Cloud SQL. In terraform, the…

Configuration files management is the core component of every configuration management tool. Templates are one of the best methods for creating configuration files as they allow dynamic variables. Ansible has a template module that uses Jinja2 in its core. Jinja2…

Google cloud instances run on top of KVM hypervisor. In newer KVM versions, such as the one used in Google Cloud, virtio-scsi is used instead of an older virtio-blk storage backend. The virtio-scsi disk devices looks like: In RHEL6, a module…

Lift and shift migration using tools like Cloudendure is the fastest way to migrate ‘on premises’ systems to Google Cloud. When the migration is complete, the environment can be refactored to use cloud-native capabilities. During application testing after a recent automated…

In the TICK stack from influxdata , Telegraf is used to collect and send data to influxdb. Metrics in Influxdb can then be viewed using visualization tools like Grafana. There are several input and output plugins for telegraf, which can…

Minto Joseph explains how to run logstash in Amazon EC2 Container Service.

The behavior of vm.swappiness was always a bit confusing for novice linux users, as setting vm.swappiness to 0 would not completely disable swapping in the system during a memory crunch. vm.swappiness would only affect the agressiveness of swapping. Following upstream…

Minto Joseph, Site Reliability Consultant at Pythian, explains how to encrypting sensitive data in puppet using hiera-eyaml.

Minto Joseph, Site Reliability Consultant at Pythian, details his experience debugging Kibana using Chrome developer tools.

  Nagios authentication with Active Directory aligns with user management consolidation policies in most organizations. This post explains how to setup Nagios authentication with Active Directory, while using Apache as web server. mod_authz_ldap is an apache LDAP authorization module. This can…