Elasticsearch Series ELK
If you ever managed a Linux server or developed application for it; you probably know about Splunk; it captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations. There exists free version that one can try out or even use in production, it comes with 500Mb / day indexing limit, which is enough for many applications. Splunk also has API and allows third party applications, there is even official C# SDK in case its your preferred development platform; seeing the Github activity of its repository seems like nothing much going on there lately. There exists an open source and much better alternative; Elasticsearch. Its open source, actively developed and maintained, strong community and ecosystem and offers not one but two .NET client libraries NEST and Elasticsearch.NET and they are actively maintained and developed.
Floating IP and Containers
Floating IP or Virtual IP address can be moved from one host to another in the same network / datacenter; this technique can be used to implement high availability infrastructure. If one host goes down; the floating ip address is given to a redundant host!
Rancher–First Application
Lets deploy the first application on our Rancher Environment that we created in the first post. We will be deploying let’s Chat application; its an open source Slack clone built using NodeJS and MongoDB. There exists an official let’s Chat Docker Container so we have a quick clean start.
RancherOS
Containers in general and Docker Containers in particular are becoming popular everyday mainly because they allow us to have a componentized environment to run the applications and host them on premises or in cloud seamlessly. Containers are portable and simple; vendors are adding new features to allow us to create scalable container environments. Containerizing a simple application following Micro-Service Architecture and then making it scalable and high available; things become complex very quickly; managing and running these application becomes daunting. “Container Orchestration Tools” becomes necessity for Production Environments. These tools provide multi-host / cluster aware container manageability, assist in mitigating security and networking issues and provide services that are needed to scale the applications.