How to create a seal only token for Hashicorp Vault

Introduction

When using Hashicorp’s Vault you may want to have an authentication token which only has permissions to seal the vault. This can then be used in an emergency situation to seal the vault, perhaps through a chatbot.

Monitoring scalable infrastructure

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on May 8th, 2017.

Recently we’ve been thinking a lot about monitoring. In a world of ephemeral servers, auto-scaling, spot instances and infrastructure-as-code, monitoring has to be tackled differently.

A Raspberry Pi Docker Cluster

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on December 12th, 2015.

Introduction

We are fortunate in the Lab to have a small stash of Raspberry Pis in our cupboard which are used at hackathons and other events. As there are no events using them currently I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a nice demonstration piece to show off clustering containers.

Building with Kubernetes

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on October 1st, 2015.

For our 3D visualisation project we wanted to build a data processing service using Docker containers. We quickly found that once you are running more than a couple of containers you need a way to manage them. After looking into the different tools available we decided to give Kubernetes a go, this is what we learned.