30
Dec, 2019
New Year, New Adventure
CloudI’ll skip the build-up and jump straight to the whole point of this post: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has come up and I’m embarking on a new adventure starting in early 2020. No, I’m not changing jobs…but I am changing time zones.
Sometime in the next month or two (dates are still being finalized), I’ll be temporarily relocating to Tokyo, Japan, to help build out VMware’s Cloud Native Field Engineering team to provide consulting and professional services around cloud-native technologies and modern application platforms for customers in Japan. Basically, my charter is to replicate the former Heptio Field Engineering team (now the Cloud Native Field Engineering Practice within VMware) in Japan.
Accomplishing this feat will involve a variety of responsibilities: a pretty fair amount of training/enablement, engaging customers on the pre-sales side, helping lead projects on the post-sales (delivery) side, mentoring team members, performing some project management, probably some people management, and the infamous “other duties as required.” All in about six months (the initial duration of my assignment), and all while learning Japanese! No big deal, right?
I’m both simultaneously excited and scared. I’m excited by the idea of living in Tokyo, but let’s be honest—the language barrier is significant. I’ve already started learning Japanese, and I’ll be receiving language training in Japanese once I arrive in Tokyo. Even so, Japanese is considered one of the “harder” languages to learn for a native English speaker, and even though I’m already conscientiously studying my hiragana and katakana there is still so much I have yet to learn!
Because so much of my “mental capacity” will be taken up learning Japanese, finding my way around Tokyo, and such, I’ve decided to simplify some aspects of how I use technology on a daily basis. The most significant change is that I’ve moved back to macOS from Linux. While I love Linux, I just don’t have time to deal with the annoying little issues that crop up on a fairly regular basis. I need things to just work. While macOS isn’t perfect (not by a long shot!), things do tend to just work (generally). I also switched back to an iPhone (I bought an iPhone 11 Pro) from Android (I had been using a Google Pixel 3).
Perhaps the biggest drawback of this assignment is that Crystal will not be joining me in Tokyo. Her real estate business here in the Denver metro area is finally taking off, and we agreed that taking time off to be with me in Tokyo would be very detrimental. While I will miss her immensely, I also want to make sure she has the opportunity to be successful in her career. Instead, she’ll regularly come to Tokyo to see me and spend some time with me, and I’ll be back in the US to visit her at least once (possibly more) during my assignment in Japan. We’ll also stay in touch via things like FaceTime (one reason I switched back to an iPhone—yes, I know there are alternatives, but again I need things to just work) and other mechanisms. If you’ve been part of a long distance relationship like this, I’d love to hear from you about things you did to help stay close (emotionally).
I will, of course, continue blogging as frequently as possible. (Don’t worry, I’ll still blog in English.) I’ll still be active on Twitter, and you’ll still be able to connect with me on the Kubernetes Slack community. The time difference may make it difficult for US-based folks to stay in touch, but I’m sure we can figure it out.
So what do you think—am I crazy? I’d love to hear from you, so if you have tips on learning Japanese, suggestions for things I should do while I’m in Tokyo, or if you just want to say hi, hit me up on Twitter.
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27
Dec, 2019
Technology Short Take 122
CloudWelcome to Technology Short Take #122! Luckily I did manage to get another Tech Short Take squeezed in for 2019, just so all my readers could have some reading materials for the holidays. I’m kidding! No, I mean I really am kidding—don’t read stuff over the holidays. Spend time with your family instead. The investment in your family will pay off in later years, trust me.
Networking
- Teammate Alex Brand has a look at VMware’s new OVS-based CNI plugin, Antrea.
Servers/Hardware
- Adam Leventhal takes a closer look at the financial side of AWS Outposts, which was announced as generally available at this year’s re:Invent.
Security
- Bruce Schneier writes about how some Chinese hackers are bypassing RSA software token authentication (the title is a bit more broad, implying other forms of two-factor authentication are affected, but the article focuses on attacks against the use of RSA software tokens).
- Robin Moffatt discusses detecting and analysing SSH attacks with ksqlDB.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Ahmet Alp Balkan talks about how the Knative Serving component addresses some key networking challenges within Kubernetes.
- Teri Radichel has a post with some structural tips to better understand and utilize AWS CloudFormation.
- Geert Baeke walks readers through deploying AKS with Nginx, External DNS, the Helm Operator, and Flux (all using an Azure DevOps pipeline, if I read the article correctly).
- Seth Vargo walks through how to use Terraform to setup and configure a Google Cloud Run service.
- Hashicorp recently announced a new Kubernetes integration with Vault aimed at making secrets injection easier; read about it here.
- Here’s a list of 35 advanced tutorials to help learn Kubernetes, courtesy of Aymen El Amri (and the authors of the various tutorials, of course).
Operating Systems/Applications
- Continuing his focus on
cloud-init, Luc Dekens has added four more articles to his site discussing this tool. Be sure to check them out (part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5)! - Cole Atkinson discusses the fact that
osxfuseis no longer open source, and the ramifications of this development on open source in general. - Wesley David ran into some challenges with the
UseKeychainSSH configuration directive on macOS, and proposed a potential solution (the solution worked for him). - I’m pretty satisfied with
bashas my shell, but a lot of folks likezsh, andzshis now the default shell on macOS Catalina (apparently). This article has a list of tips and tricks forzsh. - Jessica Joy Kerr shares her settings for working in Visual Studio Code.
- Jeff Johnson discusses an undocumented Catalina file access change.
- This combination of
fzfandkubectllooks interesting, but requires the use of a server-side component in order to address latency issues—which are a real killer for a CLI auto-completion sort of tool. - Michael Gasch shares his
tmuxsetup.
Storage
- I recently saw an article stating that VMware is going to use Minio as the object storage platform for Kubernetes, but the evidence presented in the article is anything but convincing. In fact, the one slide the article uses as evidence is just an example of how Minio might be deployed on Kubernetes, and the slide also includes examples of deploying MySQL and Redis. I’m not going to link to the article because, quite frankly, I think it’s just plain incorrect.
Virtualization
- Bjoern Brundert has a collection of resources for Project Pacific (announced at VMworld 2019). Give it a look if you’re interested in learning more.
- I recently spotted Multipass, a virtualization solution for working with Linux instances. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks interesting for sure.
Career/Soft Skills
- While reading something else, I found a link to James Stuber’s site, and—being a productivity geek—I found this list of his current productivity tech stack to be interesting.
That’s all for 2019—at least as far as Tech Short Takes go. Have a great weekend and great upcoming holiday, everyone! As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter if you have feedback, suggestions for improvement, corrections, or if you just want to say hi!
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