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All Blog Posts for cloud

  • ITGix: Top IT Outsourcing Firm According to Clutch

    ITGix: Top IT Outsourcing Firm According to Clutch

    ITGix is proud to be named among the top outsourcing companies by Clutch, ratings and review platform based in Washington DC. We were considered for this honor because of our service offerings in cloud consulting, managed services, and IT strategy consulting. The shortlist was a part of Clutch’s Global Awards which recognizes the top service providers in the B2B field.Our rating was determined primarily by our ability to deliver quality services from to our clients. Analysts at Clutch interviewed some of our partners to learn more about the projects we have helped them out with and their experience with us. We are proud to have received a 5-star review. Below is an expert: “We recently had a disaster on one of our cloud platforms, and we were able to resume service using ITGix’s disaster recovery site. They’re a solid company that our employees enjoy interacting with... They’re responsive and timely. Because of the nature of the work, we share a large amount of documentation, and they keep it organized and accessible. We communicate via email.”  We are very proud of our accomplishment. We encourage you to read the complete review on our profile and reach out to us if you wanted to learn more about our IT services! 

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  • Infrastructure as a Code with Terraform – From declarative language and templates to simple programming language

    Infrastructure as a Code with Terraform – From declarative language and templates to simple programming language

    Our passion at ITGix is programming and working with Cloud services and tools. With all the different sets of projects we have, our motivation and experience are inspired from technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Icinga, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, GitLab, Jenkins, AWS, Google Cloud and many more tools and services. Recently I got keen on Infrastructure as a Code and for the purpose we are using Terraform. Terraform is a somewhat versatile tool used for automating, codifying your Infrastructure and deploying resources around most of the major Cloud services providers. It uses a declarative language, developed by HashiCorp, called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language), which many people think that is a limited and not really innovative programming language. Personally, I cannot share the same opinion, however I can agree that setting conditional logic in Terraform can be a bit tricky and some certain types of tasks become very difficult without access to a full programming language.

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  • Icinga2 Fine-Tuning

    Icinga2 Fine-Tuning

               Icinga2 is a great tool built upon the foundation of the well known Nagios monitoring, inheriting all the pros it has to offer. With many plugins available in your repository and thousands more in the community-driven Nagios-exchange website, icinga2 is a very good choice for your infrastructure monitoring. I will cover some of the optional features that can be tweaked to suit your needs, once the main configuration has been set up. Some of the points are: Taking full advantage of variables defined in your Host file. Setting up custom scheduled downtimes. Changing the timeout for specific checks. Using a different user for your checks. Writing your own plugin.

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  • Installing PeerVPN with Ansible

    Installing PeerVPN with Ansible

    In addition to the article about the PeerVPN installation and configuration, I will now show you more advanced and quite ‘modern’ way to provision several servers and get your VPN client up really fast. You’ve probably heard of Ansible already. Well, one of its use cases is exactly what we need here: Configuration Manager. Many of us have experienced The Headache, when you need to install, configure and then administer a whole environment. Yes, to repeat the same steps on hundreds of servers, where you have different OS distributions, application versions and all kind of dependencies, and all of that certainly lead to some problems.Well, Ansible is here to help you with all that stuff. You can choose, set and customize anything that is required for specific environment and suit its needs. So, let us start with the introduction to ansible, its structure and components.In my opinion there are two approaches when you first start with Ansible. The first one is to read the official introduction to Ansible, which explains a lot about its structure and then start with simple playbook which you then extend to a role. Or the second one, where you make use of the Ansible Galaxy, which has a lot of community-provided roles open for use. Well not every role is that much scalable and flexible as you want so you can simply combine both approaches, take an already built role and expand its functionalities. If you learn that quick and all of that is boring, you can start building your own Ansible modules.

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  • Levitation in Virtual world or how to convert Xen images to KVM

    Levitation in Virtual world or how to convert Xen images to KVM

    The rule of the "cloud" has already been established and now we have multiple vendors fighting for market share. Many companies started relying on the cloud and seeking more and more automation and could services. It looks easy, you just select a cloud provider, use it's services and you have several virtual machines or containers within minutes. Sounds like magic? Well, Here is the question you are probably asking yourself . What is behind it all? The answer is;  good old virtualization, strong APIs and scripting.   I guess most of you, who are to some extent already familiar with vitualization, and have the affinity to work with opensource technologies have used Xen. It was the very first in the opensource world, and that is for sure. Its first release was in 2002 and it definitely became one of the dominant virtualization solutions in the opensource world. If we take a look at the main vendors like Oracle for example, we will see that behind OVM is again Xen. At the same time lots of companies started using another solution, which you might have heard of - Citrix. The company that created it became very well known.  

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  • Backing up your virtual machines in Openstack

    Backing up your virtual machines in Openstack

    Backup is an essential part of the IT infrastructure management. Having HA solutions, RAIDs etc. doesn't free you from the need of backup. In case of a human error all those techniques will not save you, only the backup will. However as the saying goes "Your backups are only as good as your restores", so we have to think about regularly checking our backups for consistency.In Openstack it's highly recommended to use Cinder as the main storage provider. Cinder gives you the possibility to create block volumes and attach them to your virtual machines. The best practice is that you keep all your application data onto volumes and not on the instance disk, this disk should be used for the operation system files only, that come from the OS image ( of course packages installed from repositories will also go there) . In this article we will show you more reasons to do so.What you would typically want from a good backup solution is: online backup possibility, easy restores, consistency, easy management, to use as less space as possible.Although it's possible to have a traditional backup solution installed on every virtual machine, Openstack offers us other options to backup our data using snapshotting. The downside is that you can't have an "incremental" snapshot copy yet, you have to store the full size of your snapshots every time you backup. However the simplicity of backups and more importantly restores is far greater than supporting a "in-VM" backup solution that supports incremental backups. 

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  • Monitoring Openstack Part 2

    Monitoring Openstack Part 2

    In my previous blogpost I was discussing how to monitor RabbitMQ as a centralized message Q of Openstack. Well, that's quite important but the end goal of having cloud are the instance on top of the machine. Most of you and especially the infrastructure guys who dig into monitoring will know what are the most important components to look over.The reason to monitor is to have reasonable planning which is probably the drill in cloud environment where you have spawnlarge number of virtual machines of containers. On the other hand having the data in one glance is very easy to increase the reliability, uptime plan better your architecture and identify the bottlenecks of your setup.

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  • Monitoring Openstack Part 1

    Monitoring Openstack Part 1

    Last year we focused on the Openstack technology and the projects behind it. We decided to stress on it and move our scope in that direction because of the rich features and flexibility that it provides. But as we know great power comes with great responsibility.

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  • Configuring multiple block storage backends in OpenStack Cinder

    Configuring multiple block storage backends in OpenStack Cinder

    If you're an administrator of virtualized environments you have definetly ran into IO performance issues. IO is the first bottleneck that one hits. Luckily persistant storage has evolved troughout the years and lately we see the high performant SSDs at a reasonable price, still far higher to allow organizations to fully migrate to SSD. The hybrid environments become more and more popular as they combine the low costs for traditional HDD with the high performant Solid state drives. One of the key features of the Cinder storage back- end component of Openstack is the flexibility that allows us to have more than one storage backend on our storage node. This gives us the flexibility to diferentiate the IO heavy applications from the more compute-oriented ones that are more heavy on cpu usage. Typical example is to configure a database VM to run from a SSD drive and the application server cluster to be on a normal storage that is heavily read only during startup. Here is how to achive that with OpenStack and Cinder.

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  • ITGix is starting its own DevOps platform!

    ITGix is starting its own DevOps platform!

    ITGix is proud to announce the start of our innovative DevOps Platform. It aims to enable companies integrate latest DevOps practices in their environments, while keeping everything in well organized and automated manner.

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