To start this year’s series of contribution to the open source community, we’re proud to announce the release of yet another tool that we use to monitor our production setup, namely a Prometheus metrics exporter for the Dovecot POP/IMAP mail server. If your email setup is also based on Dovecot and use Prometheus for monitoring, we’d like to invite you to give this exporter a try.

Kumina can look back on a successful year. A lot happened at Kumina these past 12 months. We carried out challenging new projects and started new collaborations with amazing organisations. Behind the scenes, we worked hard on optimising and extending our services. We also welcomed new colleagues at our team. Read everything about the latest developments at Kumina in 2016 and about our future plans.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on replacing and improving our existing monitoring and trending setup with Prometheus. After searching online, we haven’t been able to find a Prometheus metrics exporter that could act as a drop-in replacement for pmacct, which is why we’ve decided to develop it ourselves, called promacct. Where proamcct differs from pmacct is that instead of periodically storing results to a database, it provides access to its metrics over HTTP, allowing Prometheus to scrape it directly. Today we’re glad to announce that we’re releasing promacct as Open Source Software. Be sure to give it a try and let us know whether it works for you.

Today we’re happy to announce that Birdwatcher is now available on ​our company’s GitHub page. Birdwatcher accesses Calico/BIRD metrics through Prometheus. If you’re a user of both Calico and Prometheus, be sure to give it a try. Enjoy!

Kumina is sponsoring CloudABI: CloudABI is a UNIX-like programming environment for Linux and the BSDs that allows you to easily design sandboxed applications. It accomplishes this by making strong use of capability-based security, inspired by the University of Cambridge’s Capsicum. Compared to traditional UNIX applications, CloudABI applications are better resistent against security vulnerabilities, easier to test and easier to maintain. CloudABI is available as Open Source Software, free of charge.

Today we’re glad to announce that we’re releasing Buckler as open source software. Buckler is free alternative to Shield, a light-weight proxy for Kibana, written in Python (Django). It allows you to restrict access in Kibana by adding password authentication. When logged in, a user is only allowed to access indices specified for that user in Buckler’s configuration file.

Heb jij ervaring met Linux (Debian) en ben je op zoek naar een nieuwe uitdaging binnen een open maar professionele werkomgeving? Dan is Kumina misschien wel dé plek voor jou. We zijn een groeiend bedrijf en momenteel op zoek naar een Debian Linux Systeembeheerder die ons team wil komen versterken.

At Kumina, we’re strong users of the Amazon AWS cloud computing platform. We’ve been using EC2 instances for quite some time and are currently working on expanding this by making use of Kubernetes. To further optimise our solutions, we’ve developed a new utility called awssyncer, which is as of now available on GitHub! awssyncer is a utility written in C++ that uses Linux’s inotify to keep track of local modifications to a directory on disk. The purpose of this utility is to use these inotify events to determine which files need to be synced back into S3. This utility thus provides continuous one-way sychronisation from local disk to S3. A simple container startup script is used to sync files from S3 to local disk on startup. Though we realise that this utility is fairly specific to our situation at hand, we do invite all of you to give it a try.