Delaying elastic beanstalk instance termination - amazon-elastic-beanstalk

We'd like our PHP based environment to auto scale up and down based on load.
Our users send emails that get queued in postfix queues on the machine, and we also have other short running tasks in the background (e.g. creating PDFs).
Is there any way we can tell the scaling thing to wait until the mail spool is empty and any currently running jobs have finished?
I'd rather stay away from worker environments for now to make migrating to AWS easier/more similar to our existing setup.
Thanks in advance.

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Creating a Staging VM in Google Compute Engine

I'm trying to set up a Staging VM for a site that's in production that I have just inherited. The site is running Wordpress/Woocommerce and has not been updated in a while. The VM it's hosted on is running an old version of PHP. Obviously, this all needs to be fixed up but I'm unfamiliar with GCP Compute Engine. Also any attempt to run backup/clone plugins crashes the site and requires a restore from the daily snapshot which is very annoying.
Is it possible to clone the VM/disk to a new instance, point that at a temporary domain, and test/update the site? I have been trying to do this for a while now without much luck any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Creating a clone of an existing VM is possible and quite easy.
Create a snapshot of the VM. If possible stop the VM before doing this to ensure 100% accuracy - this way you will have exact snapshot of the drive without any errors. You can do it while the VM is running too if stopping it is out of the question.
Create a VM from the shapshot - select as a boot disk a snapshot that you've just created. Remember to assign a static public IP to this VM (unless you want it changed after VM restart and since you're going to do some configuration this would likely happen). You can change the VM's specs at this time too - nothing stops you from adding/removing CPU's, RAM etc. It may well be that your VM is underutilised and you can use something smaller to save costs. Or the opposite.
Start the machine. Now you can modify your WP configuration to point to a new domain. Depending on the SSL certificate - you can either use external one or the one provided by GCP (most convinient solution).
If you already own a domain you want to use for staging you can host it in Cloud DNS or at some other provider - just point it to the external IP you just reserved.
If you will be hosting your domain in the Cloud DNS then you will find necessary infomration in the documentation about managed zones (domains).
You can also consider creating a new VM and setting it as a template for creating a group of VM's (managed autoscaled group) and creating an external HTTPS load balancer in front of it. But this adds a little to the complexity so it's just my idea if you needed to handle a lot more traffic.

Alerts for containers in bluemix

This Monday 24th, I had a problem with a container and Secure Gateway Client in Bluemix. The container was stopped and SecureGatewayClient was inhibited (it answered error 500 but it showed Started)
Is it possible to send an alert for a Container of Bluemix, for example, the alert will send an email or call an API if the container will stop?
In the case of SecureGatewayClient, I think to monitor the services through the SecureGateway, every 5 minutes I will test the services, but I can accept more ideas...
I can't really speak to potential container issues, but I can provide some details on how the Secure Gateway Client works. The Secure Gateway Client runs as a clustered process where the actual connective pieces are worker processes beneath a single management process. Because of this, if the worker process goes down, the container is essentially none the wiser as long as the management process is still running, as the management process is the entry point for the container.
The Secure Gateway Client supports a --service option that will cause the management process to monitor the worker count. Should the worker count reach 0, the manager will create new workers with the credentials passed on startup.
For example, starting with:
ibmcom/secure-gateway-client myGatewayID -t myGatewaySecurityToken --service
would spawn a worker that will attempt to connect to myGatewayID. Should that worker process terminate for some reason, the management process would create a new worker within 60s as a replacement.

Why is spark filling the tmp (spark.local.dir) in the machine that submits jobs?

I have a spark 1.2.1 cluster set up in standalone mode with a master and a few slaves. I then let my data scientists enjoy the cluster's power.
All is working fine. However, the dedicated server that my data scientists used to submit spark jobs have its spark.local.dir filled up gradually.
Given that this machine is sitting outside of the cluster, not a master, nor a worker/slave, I wouldn't think that the local spark.local.dir is used in any way by spark. (And why would it? It only shows the logs.)
I could not find a good doc detailing this part of information. Does anybody have an idea?
Not enough information about your setup to be sure, but I am guessing that the jobs are launched in client mode where the driver would be on your client node.
From the spark docs:
In client mode, the driver is launched in the same process as the client that submits the application. In cluster mode, however, the driver is launched from one of the Worker processes inside the cluster, and the client process exits as soon as it fulfills its responsibility of submitting the application without waiting for the application to finish.
I am guessing that in client mode the driver (on your client machine) of the application needs plenty of scratch space to manage the other workers in that case.

Synchronization and time keeping of multiple applications

How would I implement a system that will keep 20 applications running on a closed network to stay synchronized whilst performing various tasks?
Each application will be identical, on an identical machine. These machines will have a socket connection to the master application that will issue TCP commands to the units such as Play:"Video1.mp4". It is vital that these videos are played at the same time and keep time with each other.
The only difference between each unit is that the window will be offset on the desktop, so that each one has a different view port on the application - as this will be used in a multi-projector set up.
any solutions/ideas would be greatly appreciated.
I did it some years ago. 5 computers running 5 instances of the same flash app. Evey app was displaying a "slice" of the same huge app and everything needed to be synchronized at fractions of seconds precision.
I used a simple Python script (running on a 6th machine) that was sending OSC messages on the local network. the flash apps were listening through FLOSC to this packets, and were sending to the Python script message about their status.
The stuff was running at the Withney Museum (NY) and at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), so I'm quite confident about the solution :) I hope it helps you
You have to keep tracking and latest updated data in your master application. you have to broadcast your newly updated data to all connected client to deliver updated data. after any update from any client you have to send updated data to all connected clients.
In FMS remote shared object is used to maintain data centrally across the network connected application via FMS. when any client is sending any updated OnSync Event is fired to all client application and data is sync with FMS Remote Shared Object. So this kind of Flow you have to develop for proper synchronization of data across network.
you can also use the RPC system to sync data between all connected application to the Master application. in that you have to init RPC to the client to Master application to send data update and Master application send RPC to all other client which are connected to the Master application.

Integrate different Nagios webservers

I have different sites running with 4 to 5 server at each location. All the locations have one monitoring server with Nagios. Now I want to create a central location and want to combine all the nagios services running at each location. Can anyone please point me to some documentation for these type of jobs.
There are two approaches that you can take.
Install a new Nagios core as you did at each location and perform active checks on each of the remote hosts. You'll likely end up installing NRPE on each of the remote hosts at each location and can read this document for the details: http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/nrpe/NRPE.pdf. If your remote servers are Windows servers, you can use NSClient to much of the same things that NRPE does for Linux hosts. This effectively centralizes your monitoring server. I also wrote some how-to style entries for using NRPE to run privileged commands http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=479 or to run event handlers http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=458. If you get tired of installing NRPE, you can use my script here http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=185. I also have instructions to install NSClient here http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=201.
Install a new Nagios core as you did at each location and perform passive checks by instructing the remote Nagios cores to feed their results to the new central Nagios core's passive command file. I haven't done this myself, so I'm going to point you to the communities documentation here http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/passivechecks.html. You could probably look at my event handler post to set up event handlers that send checks to the main server.
From my personal experience, the first option I mentioned is easier to implement, and is far easy to administer. However, as your server fleet grows you'll start seeing major CPU bottlenecks with the main Nagios core. This is where passive checks would become beneficial, as the main Nagios core simply waits for critical checks to be sent to it rather than having to check them itself.
Hope this helps. :)
A centralized view tool may be what you are looking for. There are a number of different options available.
Nagiosfusion
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