Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Infrastructure as code is an important methodology for ensuring that your distributed systems are treated as cattle and not pets. Your Kubernetes and Rancher clusters are no different. You should be able to provision your Rancher clusters, your Kubernetes clusters, and all of your apps with automation.

Back in 2017, I wrote a post titled “3 pro tips for Developers working with Kinesis streams”, in which I explained why you should avoid hot streams with many Lambda subscribers. When you have five or more functions subscribed to a Kinesis stream you will start to notice lots of ReadProvisionedThroughputExceeded errors in CloudWatch.

Imagine you are driving a car on a freeway. Your speedometer is telling you you’re going 62 mph. But you “gotta go fast”. Faster than then 65 mph speed limit. So you go for it: first 68mph, then 75mph, then 80mph. Then you pass a police officer hiding in a speed trap. To your dismay, they pull you over and give you a ticket. All is not lost: there is a silver lining here.

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Infrastructure management has come a long way. (Mostly) gone are the days of manual configurations and deployments, when using SSH in a “for” loop was a perfectly reasonable way to execute server changes. Automation is a way of life. Configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible — once on the bleeding edge — are now used by most enterprises.

Have you ever found yourself trying to reconstruct an event from the past only to come up blank because you cannot go so far back in time? If only you could bring back that missing piece of the puzzle! In the world of IT, logs are the way machines and software record events. They help us understand when an event happened, where they happened and most importantly, why they happened.

Today we are announcing the support for Windows containers with Kubernetes 1.14 in Preview mode. As many users may know, Rancher 2.1.0 supported Windows containers in experimental mode. Now that SIG Windows and Microsoft have announced the general availability of containers in Windows Server 2019 with Kubernetes 1.14, we have upgraded Rancher to both support the latest version of Windows containers (and Kubernetes) and after the preview is over, make it generally available.

Amazon ECS allows you to run Docker containers your application without having to actually manage physical hardware (or virtual hardware, in the case of the Fargate launch type). However, since it’s 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 to monitor ECS and what is important to watch.