What follows is an minimalistic, bare-bones guide to get you started with Red Hat subscriptions quickly. No spoon-feeding, no introductions, just get your first RHEL* system into a blessed state quickly, while your attention can still keep up. 

We assume you are starting from scratch and generally have no glue. We also assume that your boss has punished you with this task, not your mom, and therefore you represent a company, not a Sapiens specimen that looks like you. If this is not the case, then it isn’t.

Introduction

AWS EC2 is a very convenient place for experimenting with and testing things on virtual machines (or “EC2 instances”). However, it is also very easy to forget such EC2 instances running for no reason, which can become very costly very quickly. Fortunately In AWS computing (e.g. CPU, memory and I/O usage) and storage (disk) usage are billed separately. In other words: if your EC2 instance is stopped, you only pay for its storage. This cuts down the costs significantly, especially if your are using powerful EC2 instance types. So, you definitely should to stop EC2 instances automatically, say, every evening, if you don’t need them to be up. There is no built-in way in to do, though, so this article shows a couple ways it can be done.

Introduction

Being able to build IT infrastructure always having to involve an IT, operations or platform team seems be a big priority for many organizations. This is understandable because processes typically slow down to a crawl when they have to pass organizational boundaries. Also, teams responsible for infrastructure would not want to spend time on routine requests if possible. Provisioning infrastructure is no exception here. It is possible to create a custom solution to enable self-service infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform, but that takes a fair amount of effort. In this article we focus on open source and commercial open source offerings that make enabling self-service infrastructure provisioning easier.

Toimitusjohtajamme Samuli Seppänen on kutsuttu puhujaksi COSS ry:n webinaariin ma 4.12. 2023 klo 9. Webinaarin aiheena avoimen lähdekootin välinein toteutettava IT-automaatio.

“IT-automaatiolla nostetaan kierroksia samalla kun vähennetään kaasua. Avoimen lähdekoodin välinein tehdyllä IT-automaatiolla voidaan nopeuttaa ja tehostaa toimintaa sekä parantaa työn tuloksia mitattavasti. Yrityksille ja organisaatioille, joiden on pakko hakea yhä uusia keinoja kilpailukykynsä parantamiseen, IT-automaatio antaa syvällisesti toteutettuna mukavan lisäpotkun kilpailijoista erottautumiseen laadulla ja nopeudella. Strategisella automaatiolla voidaan lisäksi vähentää organisaation siiloutumista ja poistaa prosessien pullonkauloja. Mitä sitten avoimen lähdekoodin IT-automaatiosta tulisi tietää, jotta yritykset ja organisaatiot voivat valjastaa sen keskeiseksi osaksi tehokkuuden ja laadun maksimointia?”

Järjestämme yhteisen lounastapahtuman Red Hatin ja 6G Nordic Oyn kanssa Turussa 1.11.2023. Tapahtuma kulkee nimellä automaatiolounas ja siellä kuullaan käytännön esimerkkejä ja ajatuksia IT-automaatiosta ja siitä, miten se kannattaa valjastaa koko yrityksen käyttöön strategiseksi voimavaraksi. Tilaisuus on tarkoitettu tekijöille, tiiminvetäjille ja managereille - kaikille, jotka näkevät, että automaatiotason nostosta olisi hyötyä.

Lämpimästä tervetuloa!

Lisätietoja ja ilmoittautumiset tästä.

Scaling a mountain is about as easy as to install RHEL 9 in Hetzner Cloud in scalable way. At minimum, you need this article and lots of endurance to pull it off. Photo credit.

Introduction

Hetzner Cloud is a really good “small” Cloud with particularly good value for money. While it does not have hundreds of services like AWS or Azure, but it has most of the basic stuff. Hetzner cloud has built-in support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clones such as Rocky Linux 9. However, you cannot spin up real RHEL 9 instances without spending some time on it. This article will give you all the details you need to install RHEL 9 on Hetzner Cloud. We do that in a way that you can reuse your RHEL 9 installation to spin up multiple servers from one snapshot. This way you don’t have to run the RHEL installer for every RHEL server you want to spin up.

Puppeteers has started a collaboration with Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. This collaboration marks Puppeteers as a member of the Red Hat partner ecosystem, where it brings its expertise in automation and open-source technologies to the forefront.

Today, organizations across various sectors are under immense pressure to deliver services quickly while upholding stringent security practices. Information technology is pivotal in meeting these demands, and automation offers a compelling solution to address challenges related to scalability, predictability, and efficiency. Red Hat, renowned for its automation solutions, is at the forefront of helping organizations navigate these challenges.

Blackbox Exporter ICMP module and selinux do not like each other. Same goes for systemd units and ICMP Echo sockets. However, with persistence, skill and a bit of luck you can make it all work together. Photo credit.

Introduction

Blackbox Exporter is an exporter for the Prometheus monitoring system. It is able to probe a target, such as a host or an application from the outside. Blackbox Exporter does probing with modules such as http, tcp, dns, icmp and grpc (details here). The icmp module is special because it does privileged operations that require the CAP_NET_RAW capability and as well as custom selinux policies. This article aims to explain how you can make Blackbox Exporter ICMP module and selinux work together. NOTE: you do not need any of these tricks if you use non-icmp Blackbox exporter modules.

Excluding down targets in Prometheus is easy. It allow you to monitor volatile systems that start and shut down on demand.

Introduction

Prometheus is an open source metrics and alerting solution used to monitor a wide range of things. Unlike many classic network monitoring systems Prometheus is focused on colleting metrics. This makes it quite easy to do things that would be difficult in others systems. For example excluding down targets in Prometheus is quite trivial. This can be highly useful when you have volatile, static targets that come and go - for example Jenkins slaves (or build agents). Even on such targets you’d want to monitor things like systemd service status, memory usage and disk usage.

Introduction

Amazon RDS is a relational database service available on Amazon Web Services. It is essentially a managed database server with a volume for the data. Both cost money. Having a large dataset is not the only reason have big volume: the volume size determines the number of I/O operations (IOPS) the volume can do. If you have high load on your RDS instance you may very well run out of IOPS which can result in a disaster. Scaling up the volume size is easy to avoid such disasters, but it is much more difficult to reduce RDS storage size. This is because downsizing RDS storage size is not officially supported by AWS. If the load on your RDS instance goes down (e.g. due to refactoring), you may end up having a database with an oversized volume that costs lots of money for no reason.