Spot Instances Overview A Spot Instance is an instance that uses spare EC2 capacity that is available for less than the On-Demand price (up to 90% cheaper), which makes it a very cost efficient option, but comes with some downsides. Spot Instances are interruptible by AWS EC2 Spot service in what is called…

Data is a precious asset. The ability to collect, manage, and use it gives a competitive advantage to a business. When a company employs a “data-driven” approach, it means it makes strategic decisions based on data analysis and interpretation. …

Our journey to the cloud at giffgaff began in 2018, when we realised our datacenter capabilities weren’t enough to fulfil our ambitions as a technology company. The speed of change, scalability and reliability of both our infrastructure and applications were lacking behind our expectations. In December of 2019, we decided…

Before we go all hands on into resizing StatefulSet Persistent Volumes, let’s do a brief recap into what are stateful applications, what a StatefulSet is, and how Kubernetes Storage works at a high level. Stateless vs Stateful applications A stateless application is one that neither reads nor stores information about its state. By design…

A Kubernetes Job is a controller object that represents a finite task. Jobs differ from other controller objects in that Jobs manage a task as it runs to completion, rather than managing a desired state such as in Deployments, ReplicaSets, and StatefulSets do. When a specified number of successful completions…

Note: for a basic understanding of Fluentd, have a look at the following article Running Fluentd as a Daemonset in Kubernetes Fluentd is an open source data collector, which lets you unify the data collection and consumption for a better use and…medium.com The Fluentd json parser plugin, one of the many Fluentd plugins, is in charge of parsing JSON logs. In combination with dynamic mapping, makes it very easy to ship logs in JSON format to an Elasticsearch…

Fluentd is an open source data collector, which lets you unify the data collection and consumption for a better use and understanding of data. …

Recently we spotted an article in a blog from a specialist observability software company called Coralogix talking about the problems of observability at scale. We were thrilled to see that they have used our architecture as a reference point for how to scale an observability platform. …

At giffgaff we’ve been using NGINX as an Ingress Controller for our Kubernetes cluster from the very beginning. NGINX is the most adopted Kubernetes ingress provider, and has demonstrated to be a solid solution. For the last year or so we’ve been rolling out Istio to some of our workloads…