Posts on Vignesh Ragupathy

2025

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Year 2025 Reflection

Resumed writing blogs after a long gap of nearly 3 years.
Completed a challenging trek at Gingee Fort with my wife and two kids, climbing both Rajagiri and Krishnagiri hills on the same day.

My kids (aged 3 and 7) ran their first mini marathon.

Completed my first 10-miler twice, once in Chennai and once in Bangalore. The Bangalore run, done in the rain, was something special.

Surviving the Rewrite - Managing Risk and AI Memory Loss in Large-Scale Development

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:50:00 +0000

TL;DR:

I recently undertook a project that terrifies most engineers: rewriting a massive, critical infrastructure automation tool from scratch. I moved from legacy Bash to Python without writing a single line of manual code - relying entirely on AI agents. Here is how I managed the risk, the architecture, and the “memory loss” of LLMs to build a production-grade tool.

The Stakes

This wasn’t a simple CRUD app. This tool manages infrastructure for multiple teams. A logic error here doesn’t just throw a stack trace; it could wipe an entire environment or cause immediate customer impact.

Istio Hands-on Part 7 - Security with mTLS and AuthorizationPolicies

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

⬅ Back to Intro | Next → Part 8 - JWT and End-User Authentication

💡 This post is part of my Istio Hands-on Series — a practical journey into Kubernetes Service Mesh. Each post builds on the previous one with hands-on labs, real command outputs, and clear explanations aimed at learning Istio by doing, not just reading.

Objective

In this post, we’ll:

Enable and verify mutual TLS (mTLS) between services
Apply AuthorizationPolicies to control access
Test what happens when policies block or allow traffic

By the end, your frontend–backend app will communicate securely - every request encrypted and identity-verified.

Istio Hands-on Part 6 - Distributed Tracing with Jaeger

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

⬅ Back to Intro | Next → Part 7 - Security with mTLS and AuthorizationPolicies

💡 This post is part of my Istio Hands-on Series — a practical journey into Kubernetes Service Mesh. Each post builds on the previous one with hands-on labs, real command outputs, and clear explanations aimed at learning Istio by doing, not just reading.

Objective:

In this post, you’ll learn how to set up distributed tracing in Istio using Jaeger.

Istio Hands-on Part 5 - Observability with Prometheus, Grafana, and Kiali

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

⬅ Back to Intro | Next → Part 6 - Security with mTLS and AuthorizationPolicies

💡 This post is part of my Istio Hands-on Series — a practical journey into Kubernetes Service Mesh. Each post builds on the previous one with hands-on labs, real command outputs, and clear explanations aimed at learning Istio by doing, not just reading.

Objective

In this post, you’ll set up and explore Istio’s observability stack — powered by:

Istio Hands-on Part 4 - Traffic Management with VirtualService and DestinationRule

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

⬅ Back to Intro | Next → Part 5 - Observability with Prometheus, Grafana, and Kiali

💡 This post is part of my Istio Hands-on Series — a practical journey into Kubernetes Service Mesh. Each post builds on the previous one with hands-on labs, real command outputs, and clear explanations aimed at learning Istio by doing, not just reading.

Objective

In this post, we’ll learn how to use Istio’s traffic management features — specifically:

Istio Hands-on Part 3 - Understanding Sidecar Injection and Traffic Flow

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

⬅ Back to Intro | Next → Part 4 - Traffic Management with VirtualService and DestinationRule

💡 This post is part of my Istio Hands-on Series — a practical journey into Kubernetes Service Mesh. Each post builds on the previous one with hands-on labs, real command outputs, and clear explanations aimed at learning Istio by doing, not just reading.

Objective

In this part, we dive into the heart of Istio’s data plane — the sidecar proxy — and understand how traffic actually flows inside the mesh.

Istio Hands-on Part 2 - Setting Up the Playground with Kind

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

⬅ Back to Intro | Next → Part 3 – Understanding Sidecar Injection and Traffic Flow

💡 This post is part of my Istio Hands-on Series — a practical journey into Kubernetes Service Mesh. Each post builds on the previous one with hands-on labs, real command outputs, and clear explanations aimed at learning Istio by doing, not just reading.

Objective

In this post, we’ll set up our local playground for the Istio Hands-on series.You’ll learn how to:

Istio Hands-on Part 1 - From Kubernetes to Service Mesh

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

The best way to learn is by doing — and sharing what you learn.

👋 Introduction

Over the past few years, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for running microservices. It simplifies deployment, scaling, and management — but as applications grow, so does the complexity of how those services talk to each other.

Things like observability , traffic control , and secure service-to-service communication suddenly become hard problems . That’s exactly where a Service Mesh comes in.

Chapter 1 – The Beginning at Accel Frontline Ltd

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:50:00 +0000

⬅ Back to Intro | Next → Chapter 2 – Infosys Ltd

💭 This is part of my career journey series — a personal reflection on the people, experiences, and moments that shaped my path. This isn’t a résumé or professional summary; it’s simply me looking back and sharing the stories that mattered along the way.

📍 Nov 2010 – Nov 2012 | Chennai

Fresh out of college, I began my career at Accel Frontline Ltd in Chennai.

My Career Journey - Looking Back at the Path So Far

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:45:00 +0000

For over a decade, I’ve been fortunate to work across different organizations, meet amazing people, and grow through experiences that shaped both my career and my personality.

This post isn’t a résumé or a professional summary — it’s more of a personal reflection . A place to look back, remember where it all started, and appreciate the people, culture, and moments that made this journey meaningful.

Over the years, I’ve moved across cities — from Chennai to Bangalore to Navi Mumbai , and then back to Bangalore (remote) — each phase bringing its own flavor of learning, friendships, and memories.

Moving Back to Bangalore – A New Chapter After 4 Years of WFH

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:45:00 +0000

After more than four years of working from home , it’s finally time for a big change. This November, we’ll be relocating to Bangalore as part of the return-to-office transition.

It feels a bit surreal when I think about it — I joined Sage during the fully remote days and have hardly been to the office. In fact, I’ve only visited twice — once for the AWS hackathon and another time to meet the leadership team . The rest of my journey so far has been from my little home setup.

Stop Handing Out Tools Start Growing Engineers

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:45:00 +0000

Stop Handing Out Tools. Start Growing Engineers

I’ve seen this happen too many times. A new project kicks off, and the team hears:

“Here’s the tool. Here’s the plan. Just deploy.”

It feels efficient. But it skips the most important step: exploration.

When engineers are told what to use, they don’t learn why . They never see how others solve the same problem. They miss the chance to break, test, and truly understand. And over time, they stay stuck—good executors, but not real decision-makers.

The Long Road of Parenthood

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:45:00 +0000

The Long Road of Parenthood

They say it’s about the journey, not the destination. As a dad of two boys, I learn that lesson every day.

Parenting is a marathon, not a sprint. The rewards aren’t immediate—you don’t get a salary or a promotion for making it through a tantrum or helping with homework.

The real reward isn’t what we get; it’s what we become.

Our family road trips are the perfect example. We spend way more time driving than we do at whatever destination we’re heading to. But those car rides are where the magic happens.

Building AI for Observability with AWS Bedrock

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:45:00 +0000

Building AI for Observability with AWS Bedrock

In my previous post, I wrote about closing the last mile of observability with AI . The core idea was simple: we already have plenty of metrics, logs, and traces, but the real challenge is turning them into insights and answers that engineers can act on.

In that post, I highlighted two main gaps:

Connector layer – bridging multiple observability tools like Prometheus, Thanos, Elastic, etc.
Insight layer – going beyond raw queries to provide real context and recommendations.

Now, I’ve been experimenting with AWS Bedrock , and it feels like a natural way to solve both layers.

Closing the Last Mile of Observability with AI

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:45:00 +0000

Over the years, observability has grown in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I first started working in this space. Thanks to OpenTelemetry, we now have a standard way to collect traces, metrics, and logs. Tools like Grafana, Prometheus, Jaeger and Elasticsearch make it easy to store and visualize that data.

But here’s the truth I keep coming back to:
Even with all the dashboards and alerts, something is still missing.

Kubernetes monitoring in Zabbix via Prometheus backend

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Summary

Monitoring in Kubernetes is a complex task.

The traditional monitoring framework is not sufficient to handle such a massive workload.

Zabbix since version 6.0 provides a native way of integration for monitoring Kubernetes cluster.

Zabbix-Kubernetes integration provides various templates to monitor kubernetes components like kube-controller-manager, kube-apiserver, kube-scheduler, kubelet, etc.

It also supports automatic discovery of kubernetes nodes, pods and also collects metrics agentlessly.

Why I don’t like the Zabbix’s direct way of monitoring Kubernetes cluster?

Although Zabbix-Kubernetes integration looks promising in the beginning , it is not easy to use.

My life at SBI

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 12:15:00 +0000

Summary

I joined State Bank of India on July 2020 and worked for 1 year and 2 months as Manager - IT Infrastructure Architect in Enterprise and Technology Architecture department in GITC, Navi Mumbai.

My role in SBI is technical, and it involves consulting, design, Architecture and reviewing of application and infrastructure.

Through out my tenure in SBI i worked on various short term projects. Among them setting up DevOps infrastructure for SBI is one.

Plotly4Nagios - A Graph plugin for nagios monitoring

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 12:15:00 +0000

Plotly4Nagios is a nagios plugin to display the performance data in Graph. It uses the RRD database provided by pnp4nagios and visualize it in interactive graph format using plotly javascript. The first pre-release is published today in github and here is the installation document. You can experiment it and report the issue/feedback for further enhancement.

Plotly4Nagios is accepted and listed under official nagios addons

GIT badges

Features

Easy integration with nagios notes_url.
Single page view for all performance metrics.
Easy template change using configuration variable.
Docker container based deploy and run.

Prerequisite

pnp4nagios

Installation

Download plotly4nagios.tar.gz and extract it under /usr/local/plotly4nagios
Modify the config.json variables according to the environment
Copy the plotly4nagios/plotly4nagios.conf to /etc/http/conf.d/ folder and restart httpd
Add the follwing with notes_url to templates.cfg.

    notes_url /plotly4nagios/plotly4nagios.html?host=\$HOSTNAME\$&srv=_HOST_
    notes_url /plotly4nagios/plotly4nagios.html?host=\$HOSTNAME$&srv=\$SERVICEDESC$

Restart httpd and nagios.

Installation with docker(Ubuntu image)

Build the docker image using the below command

git clone https://github.com/vigneshragupathy/plotly4nagios.git
cd plotly4nagios
docker build -t plotly4nagios .

Run the docker container using the below command

docker run -it --name plotly4nagios -p 80:80 plotly4nagios

Alternatively direct pull and run from docker hub.

Publish package in NPM and serve the static content from CDN

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:15:00 +0000

I have been utilizing AWS to host my personal blog for almost 3 years now. Originally my blog was hosted in WordPress and then I migrated to ghost . It’s been 2 years now in ghost and I thought of exploring a new hosting option which should be free, supports custom domain name and free SSL.

Jekyll is a ruby based static blog generator and it has an advantage of free hosting in GitHub. The letsencrypt SSL certificate is also provided by GitHub for my custom domain so i don’t have to worry about managing it.

Kubernetes on Ubuntu 18.04 - Master and Dashboard setup

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 12:11:00 +0000

This post i am going to show how to install Kubernetes, configure Master node and enable Kubernetes dashboard in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I also tried to show the video demo explaining the entire configuration in the end of this post, This is my first video demo!!!

This post has been updated for kubernetes version 1.18

Setup

I am using the Virtualbox(running in Ubuntu 18.04 physical machine) for this entire setup . The physical machine is Dell inspiron laptop with 12GB RAM , Intel® Core™ i7-6500U CPU @ 2.50GHz × 4 and 512GB SSD hardisk.

எங்கள் ஊர்த் திருவிழா

Tue, 22 May 2018 12:09:00 +0000

சித்திரை என்றாலே திருவிழா மாதம்… பள்ளி, பரிட்சை என்று நொந்துபோன சிறார்களுக்கு அது உயிர் புதுப்பிக்கும் ஆக்சிஜன் என்றால் மிகச் சரியாக இருக்கும்.

அக்காலத்தில் மழை பெய்து வேளாண்மை, அறுவடை செய்து மற்ற மாதங்கள் ஓடும். சித்திரை வெயிலில் வேலை செய்ய முடியா காரணத்தால் அது முழுதும் கொண்டாட்டங்கள், பண்டிகைகள் என்று கழி(ளி)த்தனர் நம் முன்னோர்.

அது 15 நாள் கொண்டாட்டம்… பூச்சொரிதல் தொடங்கி முளைப்பாரி திருநாள் வரை பாடு அமர்க்களப்படும். சென்னை போன்ற பெருநகரங்களில் வசிப்பவர்கள் ஆண்டுதோறும் ஊருக்குச் செல்வதே இதுபோன்ற திருவிழாக்களுக்குத்தான்.

சித்திரை மாத ஞாயிறுகளில் பூச்சொரிந்து, அடுத்த எட்டாம் நாள் காப்பு கட்டி, நடுவில் உள்ள ஒரு வாரம் ஒவ்வொரு தெரு மண்டகப்படி நடத்தி கூழ் ஊற்றும் செய்முறை செய்து, அடுத்த ஞாயிறு அன்று திருவிழா நடைபெறும்.

Lepakshi - The land of history & mystery

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 12:07:00 +0000

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,You must travel it for yourself.It is not far, it is within reach,Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land - Walt Whitman.

It was a Friday evening on the end of summer, I called my wife from office and puzzled her by saying we have to prepare some eatables for our tomorrow’s picnic. Both of us were damn bored in weekends as we usually spend watching some old movies from our collection. Hence, She was also desperate for some out of town trip. We haven’t planned anything before. As soon as I returned home, we discussed about the places in and around Bangalore and outskirts for the picnic. Finally we landed in Lepakshi, the abandoned artistic treasure of Vijayanagar period. It is 130 kilometres away from our location in Bangalore and situated in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. We were unsure about the hotels or restaurants near the place. So, as per our tamil tradition, we prepared kattu soru, and curd rice which are taken by travelers from ancient times😜. Along with that we squeezed some lemons to fill the bottles with lemonade.

Coracle ride in river Cauvery - an adventurous car trip to Hogenakkal

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 12:03:00 +0000

A little rain for few days filled the rivers to overflow. It was a day the water turns golden brown. Plants and debris everywhere, up to the knees rippling the flowing water. The time has come for us to rejoin the infinite stream of waters.

It was around 9 am on August 15, 2017, Me and my wife geared up, to begin the expedition to Hogenakkal. My Tiago is ready, petrol tank was jammed up the day before. My car’s final free service was pending and I had the idea of doing it after the trip. I wanted to start the journey at 7 am finishing breakfast at home, but as usual, it was delayed and we decided to take breakfast on the way to Hogenakkal.

Raspberry pi – blinking led in morse

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:54:00 +0000

In my previous post i described how i created high available replicated storage with raspberrypi
In this post i will guide you how to interface raspberry pi to blink a led in morse code for the user input.The same signal fed into the LED can be send to a radio transmitter and we can transmit it in radio frequency . Recently i starter learning morse code and i am going to apply a license for Amateur radio operator.

Machine learning – Network traffic classification using weka

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:52:00 +0000

Overview

This post is about how to classify network traffic captured from wireshark using weka machine learning algorithm. I tried few other methods like nltk,sckikit,python scripts with naive bayes implementation and finally decided to use weka mainly because of its simplicity,easy to use and also because it is written in java so it is easier to integrate with other java applications(which is i am planning to do).You can check my github machine learning project page for the other methods i tried.

Trip to wild – Bannerghatta National Park

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:49:00 +0000

I have been trying my hand in photography for a few months now. Recently during a trip to Bannerghatta National Park i managed to shoot some of the wildlife using my DSLR camera. Here are few snaps from my recent trip to Bannerghatta National Park.

Tiger’s tongue is so coarse, it can lick flesh down to the bone.

The tiger’s tongue is covered with numerous small, sharp, rear-facing projections called papillae. These papillae gives the tongue is rough, rasping texture and is designed to help strip the skin, feathers, fur and meat right off its prey

bike trip to ooty

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:44:00 +0000

So…. I thought of a bike trip after New Year. This time taking my wife on the trip. So I was thinking something short in distance something less than 150 km, then Ooty comes to my mind. Then we both decided to go on a trip from Coimbatore to Ooty. It is a weekend trip, we just decided 3 days before, so no big plans.

Since it is the weekend, I know most of the hotels will be booked. So, I searched for decent hotels under 3k. After reading reviews from Tripadvisor and Google I booked Hotel Lakeview. I managed to pay around 2.5k after applying coupons from MakeMyTrip.

Bike trip to Goa

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:38:00 +0000

Someone once said “Happiness is a path, not a destination” and I know its very true when i started to travel in bike.I have plans to visit many places in bike for this year and then one of my friend called and we both decided to go Goa for a bike trip. We are 3 person in two bike, a Royal enfield and a Yamaha Fz. We don’t have much plans to do in Goa, only thing we wanted is to go there in a bike.

Network teaming – RHEL7

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:35:00 +0000

Introduction

Linux Bonding driver

The Linux bonding driver provides a method for aggregating multiple network interface controllers (NICs) into a single logical bonded interface of two or more so-called (NIC) slaves. The majority of modern Linux distributions (distros) come with a Linux kernel which has the Linux bonding driver (bonding)integrated as a loadable kernel module.

We can check the bonding module by


[root@example.com ~]# lsmod |grep bonding
bonding 142537 0

Linux Teaming driver

The Linux Team driver provides an alternative to bonding driver. it has actually been designed to solve the same problem(s) using a wholly different design and different approach; an approach where special attention was paid to flexibility and efficiency. The best part is that the configuration, management, and monitoring of team driver is significantly improved with no compromise on performance, features, or throughput.The main difference is that Team driver kernel part contains only essential code and the rest of the code (link validation, LACP implementation, decision making, etc.) is run in userspace as a part of teamd daemon.

Beautiful Budapest

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:26:00 +0000

Budapest, otherwise called the Little Paris of Central Europe is one of the celebrated vacationer spots in Europe.
This city is comprised of two particular sides, the Buda and Pest, both isolated by the wonderful Danube River.

The Buda side is notable with a few historical centers and Roman vestiges, while the Pest is the urban focus of the city and is for business, loaded with clubs, bistros, and markets.

Glusterfs ha storage with Raspberrypi

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 10:30:00 +0000

Overview

This post is about how to create a high available redundant storage (Glusterfs replicated volume) from Raspberrypi and a centos server. This is just for fun project, which i am experimenting with my new raspberrypi 2 device. This is not a perfect setup, like i am using a 2 nodes replicated volume without quorom,created brick from ext3 filesystem and on root directory etc.Do not use this setup in production 🙂