With many companies investigating or enacting remote work options in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Pythian team would like to share their best advice to those companies considering a move to remote work. Here are some of our remote…

This is the second of a series of blog posts related to Elastic Stack and the components around it. The final objective is to deploy and secure a production-ready environment using these freely available tools.  In this post, I’ll be…

This is the first of a series of blog posts related to Elastic Stack and the components around it. This first one covers how to install Elasticsearch using Ansible. The final objective is to deploy and secure a production-ready environment…

Often we get involved in projects where there are all sorts of stringent security requirements. In this post, I will share a few of the methods used to meet these security requirements within Google Cloud Platform (GCP), while still allowing…

Disable SELinux? Think again! SELinux is always a complicated topic. If you search this on the web, most people will advise just disabling it, but that may not be acceptable from a security point of view in your organization. In…

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…

If you work with Data Guard, the lag between the primary and standby database is an informative but difficult metric to measure. I’ve encountered some “solutions” that use the COMPLETION_TIME in (G)V$ARCHIVED_LOG for the standby destination as the time of…

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…

Introduction In this blog post, I’m not going to talk about what the term SRE means or how it works. My understanding is that Google has invented the term “Site Reliability Engineer” and that this is Google’s way of doing…