In the most common cases, having multiple GitLab installations is considered an anti-pattern. However, this is not always true: we manage dozens of our customers’ self-hosted GitLab instances. Periodically, the need arose to do something on all instances at once without wasting time repeating routine operations over and over. Part of that was monitoring critical GitLab updates. But there were other aspects as well including searching through the file contents in all installations or even creating users. We came up with a solution to these problems called glaball. Originally created as pa ..read more

Introducing ovpn-admin — a web interface to manage OpenVPN users PLEASE NOTE: our blog has MOVED to https://blog.flant.com/! New articles from Flant’s engineers will be posted there only. Check it out and subscribe to keep updated! 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 (including ..read more

PLEASE NOTE: our blog has MOVED to https://blog.flant.com/! New articles from Flant’s engineers will be posted there only. Check it out and subscribe to keep updated! Today, we are happy to announce our latest Open Source project — elasticsearch-extractor! This simple web UI solves just one task — it extracts a given index from the Elasticsearch snapshot. But why has this project come into being? Motivation Imagine that you have many similar Elasticsearch installations in Kubernetes, where numerous logs from applications and infrastructure are stored and analyzed. The operating sche ..read more

Starting January’21, the Flant’s blog is moving to its new home — blog.flant.com! It means that neither new articles from our engineers will be published on Medium, nor any updates for existing content are expected. Please subscribe (via email or RSS) to our new blog to stay updated! The first new article is available there already and many exciting additions are right on the way! Thank you for following us on Medium, your claps, comments, shares— and hopefully see you soon! Our blog is moving to blog.flant.com was originally published in Flant on Medium, where people are continuing ..read more

K9s — the powerful terminal UI for Kubernetes Have you already heard about K9s? It is a terminal-based UI to manage Kubernetes clusters that aims to simplify navigating, observing, and managing your applications in K8s. K9s continuously monitors Kubernetes clusters for changes and provides shortcut commands to interact with the observed resources. This Open Source project is written in Go and has been in existence for almost 2 years: the first commit was made on February 1, 2019. It boasts about 10,000 stars on GitHub and 80+ contributors. Well, let’s take a closer look at K9s and see what yo ..read more

When I heard that one famous company moving its laptops to ARM processors, I recalled that when I looked through AWS EC2 offerings, I noted that Gravitons processors are very attractively priced. The reason for this is apparent: they are based on the ARM architecture. At the time, I could not imagine that ARM would be a big player here… For me, this architecture has always been associated with mobile and IoT devices. A fully-featured ARM-based server… sounds weird, right? Still, the new idea stuck in my head, and one weekend I’ve decided to try it and see what can be run on ARM nowadays ..read more

GitOps is a modern way to make better IaC for delivering apps in Kubernetes. It is all about determinism, idempotence, automation, observability… and many other exciting features! However, are you sure all this happens in the real world using existing approach and tools? Here’s our comprehensive analysis of GitOps and its features, comparison with CIOps as well as insights on how this all should be done to actually get what each DevOps engineer dreams of. Please note the article is based on this 30-minutes video that has a bit more of details. Enjoy the talk or its text version belo ..read more

Overcoming the challenges of cleaning up container images Having lots of images residing in your container registry can become a noticeable issue while dealing with CI/CD pipelines for modern cloud-native applications delivered to Kubernetes. If you don’t want to have an overfilled registry (and to pay for this uselessly occupied space), you need to understand which images won’t be used anymore. What are the criteria to find them and why the registries simply can’t be aware of them? Here is our journey on understanding and solving this problem in a universal way. While the practical part ..read more

In this article, we will present our approach to simplifying the process of making Kubernetes operators and show how you can easily implement your own operator using shell-operator. This text is based on our recent presentation during KubeCon Europe 2020. Here is the the full video from this talk: https://medium.com/media/edb0a1b7e76c02465a383d2ac72d38b1/href … as well as its slides. However, if you prefer a shorter text summary — please enjoy below! We at Flant love to improve and automate everything. Today, we are going to talk about one intriguing and exciting concept. Pleas ..read more

Ready-to-use commands and tips for kubectl Kubectl is the most important Kubernetes command-line tool that allows you to run commands against clusters. We at Flant internally share our knowledge of using it via formal wiki-like instructions as well as Slack messages (we also have a handy and smart search engine in place — but that’s a whole different story…). Over the years, we have accumulated a large number of various kubectl tips and tricks. Now, we’ve decided to share some of our cheat sheets with a wider community. I am sure our readers might be familiar with many of them. But still ..read more