Blue Matador Blog

How to Delete Pods from a Kubernetes Node

keilan@bluematador.com (Keilan Jackson) — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 05:46:00 GMT

When administering your Kubernetes cluster, you will likely run into a situation where you need to delete pods from one of your nodes. You may need to debug issues with the node itself, upgrade the node, or simply scale down your cluster.

How to Monitor AWS SQS with CloudWatch

mark@bluematador.com (Mark Siebert) — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 16:44:55 GMT

AWS SQS is a message queuing service that allows you to send and receive huge numbers of messages from a queue using a simple API. Using Amazon SQS, without setting up any infrastructure, you can have a distributed and fault tolerant queuing system.

Since SQS is a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch and what is important to watch to have proper AWS SQS monitoring.

How to Monitor AWS Kinesis with CloudWatch

mark@bluematador.com (Mark Siebert) — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 23:04:13 GMT

If you’re using AWS Kinesis in your application, you’ll want to monitor your Kinesis streams to make sure they are healthy and that your producers and consumers are interacting with them correctly.

CloudWatch exposes many metrics that can help you determine the health of your Kinesis streams, but it can be a pain to set up. In this post, we’ll discuss the metrics that are most helpful, how to get CloudWatch up and monitoring your Kinesis streams, plus an easier alternative.

Comparing the best infrastructure monitoring tools

marketing@bluematador.com (Blue Matador) — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 21:25:55 GMT

A lot of engineers think a project is done once the code is live. In a perfect world, that could be true—alas, commits are rarely free of problems. For companies that have a lot of focus on dev but little on ops, this can quickly turn into a nightmare.

Fortunately, there are a lot of infrastructure monitoring tools out there that can help marry DevOps and keep your apps, websites, and processes running smoothly.

In this post, we’ll go over some of the most popular DevOps monitoring tools available, plus how they compare.

Function concurrency limits and throttling in AWS Lambda

mark@bluematador.com (Mark Siebert) — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 23:10:16 GMT

Have you noticed recently that your AWS Lambda invocation requests are getting throttled? If so, your Lambda functions are probably not running as designed. Let’s examine the possible causes of and solutions to poor Lambda performance.

How to estimate your AWS costs

marketing@bluematador.com (Blue Matador) — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 14:45:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pretty much ubiquitous these days, with everyone from tiny startups to large enterprises using the cloud service to run their apps, websites, and processes.

For small businesses, being able to predict your budgets is paramount. Unfortunately, AWS costs can be very difficult to forecast.

In this blog, we’ll go over the pros and cons of the tools available to help you estimate your AWS costs.

What is an inode and what are they used for?

marketing@bluematador.com (Blue Matador) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 22:01:41 GMT

Inodes, speculated to be short for “index nodes,” have been around since the introduction of the first UNIX file system around the late 1970s.

They were adopted into Linux in the 90s—and for good reason. They’re an excellent way to keep track of how your files are stored, and the method many systems are still based on today.

How we went from kops to EKS in production

keilan@bluematador.com (Keilan Jackson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:29:19 GMT

Amazon’s EKS service (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) allows you to create a Kubernetes control plane in your AWS account without having to configure Kubernetes master nodes, etcd, or the api servers. In this blog post we will cover the motivation for using EKS, the preparation required to create an EKS cluster, how to configure EKS in Terraform, and how to set up kube2iam with EKS.

2 ways to set up static IP addresses for ALB

keilan@bluematador.com (Keilan Jackson) — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:37:12 GMT

One highly requested feature of AWS’s Application Load Balancer (ALB) is the ability to assign static IP addresses. Unfortunately, ALBs do not support this feature and it is unlikely they will in the near future. Today, the only way to achieve static IP addresses for your application behind an ALB is to add another layer in between the client and your ALB which does have a static IP address, and then forward requests to your ALB. In this blog post, we will go over two solutions you can implement to get static IP addresses for your ALB.

Building and deploying a Docker image to a Kubernetes cluster

keilan@bluematador.com (Keilan Jackson) — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:55:33 GMT

Deploying Docker images to Kubernetes is a great way to run your application in an easily scalable way. Getting started with your first Kubernetes deployment can be a little daunting if you are new to Docker and Kubernetes, but with a little bit of preparation, your application will be running in no time. In this blog post, we will cover the basic steps needed to build Docker images and deploy them to a Kubernetes cluster. The topics we will cover are:

Building Docker images
Storing Docker images
Deploying with kubectl
Managing configuration
Creating build systems
Monitoring