June 17 Using Debezium, CDC for Apache Kafka, with PostgreSQL and MongoDB

In my work, I deal a lot with novel technical solutions/software. But unfortunately, it’s not always that they can boast with extensive information I might need. This article fulfills one such gap linked to my recent task when I was supposed to turn two popular DBMS (PostgreSQL и MongoDB) into event streams and send those […]

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June 7 Why Flant acquired Okmeter monitoring company and what we should expect from this deal

Okmeter is a server monitoring solution that is available in both SaaS and on-prem versions. Flant and Okmeter have been working together since 2017. For Flant, Okmeter is one of the primary tools for monitoring customer infrastructure; over the years, companies have been cooperating to improve Okmeter observability capabilities. In mid-May, Flant announced the acquisition […]

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May 27 Failure stories #2. How to destroy Elasticsearch while migrating it within Kubernetes

Our internal production infrastructure has a not too critical part which we use for testing various technical solutions, including different Rook versions for stateful applications. At the time of events described in this article, this part of the infrastructure was running Kubernetes 1.15, and we decided to upgrade it. The Rook operator v0.9 provisioned persistent […]

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May 7 Failure stories #1. How to break two ClickHouse clusters by not considering one tiny thing

As you know, we have discussed some of our failure stories before. However, this article is somewhat unique, as it launches a special series of publications dedicated to disasters that emerged due to different reasons. After all, incidents, their causes, and consequences are an essential part of our life, and exploring this “dark side” of […]

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April 23 Making the most out of Helm templates

The standard Helm library and traditional approaches to creating Helm charts are generally okay to automate non-complex tasks. But the growing complexity and number of Helm charts rapidly make the minimalistic Helm templates and controversial standard Helm library insufficient. In this article, we will show you how to make your Helm templates much more flexible […]

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April 15 How we enjoyed upgrading a bunch of Kubernetes clusters from v1.16 to v1.19

At the beginning of December 2020, we at Flant maintained about 150 clusters running Kubernetes 1.16. All these clusters have varying degrees of load. Some of them are the high-load production clusters, while others are intended for the development and testing of new features. These clusters run on top of different infrastructure solutions, starting with […]

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April 12 shell-operator v1.0.0: the long-awaited release of our tool to create Kubernetes operators

shell-operator is an Open Source solution that takes the development of Kubernetes operators to a whole new level. It was announced almost two years ago. Many new fascinating features, refinements, and additions were introduced to shell-operator since then, and, as we stated just a couple of months ago, it is perfectly ready to be used […]

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April 2 How to compare the performance of different HashiCorp Vault backends

Vault is an Open Source solution by HashiCorp for managing secrets. Its built-in modularity and scalability allow you both to run a small development server on your laptop and operate a fully-fledged HA-cluster intended for production environments. While preparing to use Vault, we asked ourselves two key questions: What backend (i.e., a place where secrets […]

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March 25 Introducing ovpn-admin — a web interface to manage OpenVPN users

Operating a diverse infrastructure for many customers, we realised a need for a convenient tool to manage OpenVPN certificates and users a long time ago. In a nutshell, we wanted to have a simple web interface instead of going through servers/containers and running all these CLI commands. Since the existing solutions that meet our requirements […]

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March 19 Recent troubleshooting cases from our SREs, part 3

Today, we are happy to continue our series of articles (part 1, part 2) dedicated to the challenges we face during our everyday operations. That’s our way to share our thoughts at the time and describe the actions that allowed us to overcome those obstacles successfully. Here, we will tell you the story of one […]

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