Popular-Posts on The IT Hollow

Deploy Kubernetes on vSphere

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 15:00:04 +0000

If you’re struggling to deploy Kubernetes (k8s) clusters, you’re not alone. There are a bunch of different ways to deploy Kubernetes and there are different settings depending on what cloud provider you’re using. This post will focus on installing Kubernetes on vSphere with Kubeadm. At the end of this post, you should have what you need to manually deploy k8s in a vSphere environment on ubuntu.

Prerequisites

NOTE: This tutorial uses the “in-tree” cloud provider for vSphere. This is not the preferred method for deployment going forward. More details can be found here for reference.

Setup AWS Transit Gateway

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 15:00:07 +0000

Amazon announced a new service at re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas, called the AWS Transit Gateway. The Transit Gateway allows you to connect multiple VPCs together as well as VPN tunnels to on-premises networks through a single gateway device. As a consultant, I talk with customers often, about how they will plan to connect their data center with the AWS cloud, and how to interconnect all of those VPCs. In the past a solution like Aviatrix or a Cisco CSR transit gateway was used which leveraged some EC2 instances that lived within a VPC. You’d then connect spoke VPCs together via the use of VPN tunnels. With this new solution, there is a native service from AWS that allows you to do this without the need for VPN tunnels between spoke VPCs and you can use the AWS CLI/CloudFormation or console to deploy everything you need. This post takes you through an example of the setup of the AWS Transit Gateway in my own lab environment.

Manage Multiple AWS Accounts with Role Switching

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 14:05:52 +0000

A pretty common question that comes up is how to manage multiple accounts within AWS from a user perspective. Multi-Account setups are common to provide control plane separation between Production, Development, Billing and Shared Services accounts but do you need to setup Federation with each of these accounts or create an IAM user in each one? That makes those accounts kind of cumbersome to manage and the more users we have the more chance one of them could get hacked.

Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs Metric Filters to Send Alerts

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 16:14:47 +0000

With all of the services that Amazon has to offer, it can sometimes be difficult to manage your cloud environment. Face it, you need to manage multiple regions, users, storage buckets, accounts, instances and the list just keeps going on. Well the fact that the environment can be so vast might make it difficult to notice if something nefarious is going on in your cloud. Think of it this way, if a new EC2 instance was deployed in one of your most used regions, you might see it and wonder what it was, but if that instance (or 50 instances) was deployed in a region that you never login to, would you notice that?

Understanding AWS Tenancy

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 15:00:10 +0000

When it comes to deploying EC2 instances within Amazon Web Services VPCs, you may find yourself confused when presented with those tenancy options. This post aims to describe the different options that you have with AWS tenancy and how they might be used.

First and foremost, what do we mean by tenancy? Well, tenancy determines who is the owner of a resource. It might be easiest to think of tenancy in terms of housing. For instance if you have a house then you could consider it a dedicated tenant since only one family presumably lives there. However, if you have an apartment building, there is a good chance that several families have rooms in a single building which would be more like a shared tenancy model.

Understanding RAID Penalty

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:34:22 +0000

Determining which type of RAID to use when building a storage solution will largely depend on two things; capacity and performance. Performance is the topic of this post.

We measure disk performance in IOPS or Input/Output per second. One read request or one write request = 1 IO. Each disk in you storage system can provide a certain amount of IO based off of the rotational speed, average latency and average seek time. I’ve listed some averages for each type of disk below.