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    22 Nov, 2019
    Technology Short Take 120
    Cloud

    Welcome to Technology Short Take #120! Wow…hard to believe it’s been almost two months since the last Tech Short Take. Sorry about that! Hopefully something I share here in this Tech Short Take is useful or helpful to readers. On to the content!

    Networking

    Servers/Hardware

    I don’t have anything to share this time around, but I’ll stay alert for content to include future Tech Short Takes.

    Security

    Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

    • Marc Boorshtein has a write-up on authentication in Kubernetes identity management. I’m glad the author explicitly called out that Kubernetes doesn’t directly connect to any kind of user store; this seems to be a point of confusion for new Kubernetes users with whom I’ve spoken.
    • Yan Cui with Lumigo tackles the concept of serverless vendor lock-in. I have to say, I agree with a lot of the statements Cui makes regarding lock-in, coupling, risk, and the role of data in lock-in. Much of what’s said in this article applies to all forms of “lock-in,” to be honest.
    • I’m glad I read this article from Michael Gasch. I understand why it’s titled the way it is, but the title does not do the excellent content justice. If you’re seeking to deepen your understanding of the Kubernetes architecture, I can heartily recommend this article. (Not to mention there’s a great set of links at the end with even more information.)
    • Jack Lindamood writes about how he regrets switching from CloudFormation to Terraform, and shares lessons learned—both good and bad—about each of these two options for infrastructure as code.
    • I love this article by Liz Fong-Jones. The sentence from which the title is taken captures it all: “Even the experts on the team were afraid to touch our Terraform configs, treating them like a haunted graveyard in which to seldom tread.” The idea of using CI for infrastructure as code is something that’s really been on my mind for the last few weeks, and so I’m glad I came across this article with lessons learned from the Honeycomb team.
    • Ryan Matteson provides some very useful information on creating Kubernetes manifests. The “TL;DR” is that kubectl explain is one of your best friends.
    • This article by Alibaba Cloud on how they scaled Kubernetes to 10,000 nodes has some useful information in it. It’s extremely unlikely that any of the steps this team took would be needed by other organizations, but the information shared does help illuminate some of the inner workings of Kubernetes—and knowing more about Kubernetes can be helpful to anyone supporting or implementing it.
    • I enjoyed this article on describing fault domains by Will Larson. In fact, I spent several hours a couple months ago playing around with dot to visually describe fault domains.

    Operating Systems/Applications

    Storage

    Nothing this time! If you happen to find something you think other readers would find useful, send it my way and I’ll see about including it in a future Tech Short Take.

    Virtualization

    Career/Soft Skills

    • I’ll put this here, since it’s most closely aligned to career: Gustavo Franco and Matt Brown, both Customer Reliability Engineers with Google, discuss potential SRE team organization. I could see this article being helpful for organizations—or individuals—who are starting down the SRE path.
    • So long, Datanauts! It turns out the show is ending, and Nick Korte takes some time to write a tribute to Datanauts.

    That’s all for now; I’ll have more links and articles in the next Tech Short Take. Feel free to contact me on Twitter to share any feedback you may have on this or other content here on the site. Thanks for reading!

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