The use of containers is growing rapidly since they provide organisations with lots of benefits and competitive advantages, but it’s important to make sure you have done your research before making the decision between virtual machines and containers. In this blog post we will try to answer the question ‘How to choose between containers and virtual machines?’ by providing you some real life business cases and examples. Hopefully, we will give you a good idea of how containers can help you keep up with evolving market and business needs.

Dinsdag 16 mei geeft één van onze medewerkers, Ed Schouten, een presentatie over het monitoringsysteem Prometheus op de voorjaarsconferentie van NLUUG. Kumina past Prometheus toe als monitoring systeem voor haar klanten en heeft diverse exporters (plugins) voor Prometheus ontwikkeld. In de presentatie vertellen we je meer over dit schaalbare en moderne monitoringsysteem. We beantwoorden de volgende vragen: Wat is het datamodel van Prometheus? Hoe komt Prometheus aan zijn data? Hoe raadpleeg ik de data en hoe werkt de querytaal? Hoe genereert Prometheus alerts? En natuurlijk uitleg over hoe wij binnen Kumina Prometheus gebruiken. De speker, Ed Schouten, focust zich bij Kumina op het uitrollen van Kubernetes en Prometheus als vervanging voor de bestaande infrastructuur in Linux-clusters. Hiervoor werkte hij tussen 2012 en 2014 voor Google als Site Reliability Engineer, hier deed hij uitgebreide ervaring op met Borg en Borgmon, waar Kubernetes en Prometheus op gebaseerd zijn.

Over the last couple of months we’ve published several blog posts to announce the release of various Open Source metrics exporters for Prometheus. The development of these exporters is an on-going process at Kumina, as we’re working towards replacing our existing Nagios-based monitoring setup with Prometheus. oday we’re proud to present to you our own Prometheus metrics exporter for Postfix, written in Go.

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.

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.