Press "Enter" to skip to content

fmarques.org Posts

Monitoring Docker Thin Pool Usage with Prometheus

Published 15th October 2018

There are plenty of tools out there for monitoring Docker using Prometheus. We can use the Node Exporter to gather useful information for Docker hosts at an OS/kernel level (memory, cpu, network, filesystem) and at a container level there is cAdvisor which reports resource usage and performance data. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any way of monitoring Docker Thin Pool usage with Prometheus so I wrote a quick Python script to generate usage metrics that are exposed using Node Exporter’s textfile collector. So first, what does “Thin Pool” in Docker means? The Docker documentation is not very clear on this and…

Continue readingMonitoring Docker Thin Pool Usage with Prometheus
Leave a Comment

Using EC2 Spot Instances with ECS

Published 9th October 2018

Had the opportunity to write an article for AWS Startups Blog, explaining how we use EC2 Spot Instances with ECS at Signal: “Every day, Signal ingests millions of documents from a growing number of publishers, including online media, print newspapers, broadcast, regulation and legislation. Our text analytics pipeline processes these documents in real time, applying our own AI algorithms and machine learning, preparing them to be searched from our application and distributed via our alerts system. The entire Signal platform is built on a large number of microservices running on Docker containers deployed to Amazon ECS. In fact, we run…

Continue readingUsing EC2 Spot Instances with ECS
Leave a Comment

America in the 1920s

Published 19th November 2017

Bill Bryson (A Short History of Almost Everything) knows how to write rich and engaging history books (he’s a remarkable storyteller). One Summer is a spectacular book for understanding America in the mad 1920s (and all the craziness around Charles Lindbergh, including early aviation history). A must read.

Leave a Comment

Using Ansible Vault with environment variables

Published 26th February 2017

This is a common trend. You’ve been using Ansible to provision your infrastructure for some time and all of a sudden you will have a couple of secrets to manage, usually SSL/SSH private keys, API credentials, passwords, etc. Because you don’t want these secrets to be stored “in the clear” on your git repository, you will declare them as variables inside yaml files and then use Ansible Vault to encrypt them using an AES symmetric key. You can then run ansible-playbook with –ask-vault-pass, so yaml var files will get decrypted on the fly when running the playbook. Sometimes I use Ansible together with other…

Continue readingUsing Ansible Vault with environment variables
Leave a Comment