HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This act of 1996 is a United States federal statute enactment. It is a series of regulatory standards that outline the lawful use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI). HIPAA compliance is regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and enforced by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
But what this ACT has to do with DevOps..? Is it related to the Corona Virus..?
No, not at all..! Let me explain to you how I landed here.
Azure Logic Apps is the PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering from Microsoft Azure. Logic Apps helps us to define workflows and build powerful solutions with the help of connectors, triggers, and actions.
Prerequisites
– Basic understanding of cloud platform and SQL Query.
Prometheus has gained a lot of popularity because of its cloud-native approach for monitoring systems. Its popularity has reached a level that people are now giving native support to it, while developing software and applications such as Kubernetes, Envoy, etc. For other applications, there are already exporters(agent) available to monitor it.
Since I have been working on Prometheus for quite a long time and recently have started doing development on it, I was confident that I can handle any kind of scenario in it. Here, in this blog, I am going to discuss a scenario that was a very good learning experience for me.
One thing I love about working with a service-based organization is that it keeps you on your toes, so you have to learn constantly. The same is the case with the current organization I am associated with.
Recently I got an opportunity to work on a project in which the client had a requirement of implementing a Prometheus HA solution. Here is a brief information about the requirement:-
They had a 100+ node Kubernetes cluster and they wanted to keep the data for a longer period. Moreover, the storage on the node was a blocker for them.
In the case of Prometheus failure, they didn’t have a backup plan ready.
They needed the scaling solution for Prometheus as well.
Our Solution
So, we started with our research for the best possible scenarios, for the HA part, we thought we can implement the Federated Prometheus concept and for long-term storage, we thought of implementing the Thanos project. But while doing the research, we came across one more interesting project called Cortex.
So, we did our comparison between Thanos and Cortex. Here are some interesting highlights:-
Cortex
Thanos
Recent data stored in injestors
Recent data stored in Prometheus
Use Prometheus write API to write data at a remote location
Use sidecar approach to write data at a remote location
Supports Long Term storage
Supports Long term storage
HA is supported
HA is not supported
Single setup can be integrated with multiple Prometheus
Single setup can be associated with single Prometheus
So after this metrics comparison, we decided to go with the Cortex solution as it was able to fulfill the above mentioned requirements of the client.
But the cortex solutions is not free of complications, there are some complications of cortex project as well:-
As the architecture is a bit complex, it requires an in-depth understanding of Prometheus as TSDB.
These projects require a decent amount of computing power in terms of memory and CPU.
It can increase your remote storage costs like S3, GCS, Azure storage, etc.
Since all these complications were not blockers for us, so we moved ahead with the Cortex approach and implemented it in the project and it started working fine right from day one.
But in terms of scaling, we have to scale Prometheus vertically not horizontally because it is not designed to scale horizontally.
If we try to scale Prometheus horizontally, we will end up with scattered data that cannot be consolidated easily, so in terms of the scaling part, we would suggest you go with a vertical approach.
To automate the vertical scaling of Prometheus in Kubernetes we have used VPA(Vertical Pod Autoscaler). It can both down-scale pods that are over-requesting resources, and also up-scale pods that are under-requesting resources based on their usage over time.
Conclusion
So in this blog, we have seen that what approach we have taken for implementing the High Availability, Scalability, and Long Term storage in Prometheus. In the next part of the blog, we will see how we actually setup these things in our environment.
If you guys have any other ideas or suggestions around the approach, please comment in the comment section. Thanks for reading, I’d really appreciate your suggestions and feedback.
Have you ever faced an issue in which while building the docker image, even though you have mentioned “apt-get -y update” the package you are trying to install is not found in the repository?
Here, in this blog, we are going to discuss two common scenarios that I faced along with the root cause of this problem. Let’s take a look.
First, it’s important to remember that valid intermediate images are not built again. They are loaded from cache. Dockerfile cache is considered valid if the build command gives a 0 return code.
It’s been more than 6 years since we began the evolution Journey called OpsTree. What a Journey it has been, we cannot thank God and the co-travellers more!!
In 2014 we realized – Cloud and DevOps had arisen in the IT landscape while the industry was still waking up to it. We decided to wake up early and be ready and equipped – aspiring that industry could “Rely on us” – to navigate them comfortably in the realm DevSecOps.
