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Bobby Hellard

UK gov is reportedly looking at ways to support hybrid approaches, despite the loss of footfall traffic

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Read MoreUK city centres to lose ‘billions’ due to hybrid working

Lara Caimi, Chief Customer and Partner Officer at ServiceNow, talks with TechRepublic’s Bill Detwiler about hybrid work, digital transformation and the future of the office. …

Read MoreServiceNow’s Chief Customer and Partner Officer on how to build a hybrid workplace that works

Salesforce CTO and co-founder Parker Harris talks about TrailheaDX 2021 and how low-code is dramatically changing the process of business software development. …

Read MoreTrailheaDX 2021: Salesforce’s Parker Harris explains how low-code is reshaping software development

Welcome to Technology Short Take #141! This is the first Technology Short Take compiled, written, and published entirely on my M1-based MacBook Pro (see my review here). The collection of links shared below covers a fairly wide range of topics, from old Sun hardware to working with serverless frameworks in the public cloud. I hope that you find something useful here. Enjoy!

Networking

• Via Ivan Pepelnjak, I was pointed to Jon Langemak’s in-depth discussion of working with Linux VRFs.
• I read a couple of Cilium-related blog posts recently that may be useful. The first is a post on Cilium and F5 load balancer integration, while the second discusses implementing Kubernetes network policies with Cilium and Linkerd.
• Sonia Cuff provides a set of links for detailed instructions on setting up VPN access from macOS to Microsoft Azure with Azure Active Directory authentication.
• Patrick Kremer walks through using Postman to implement BGP route filtering with VMware Cloud on AWS. I think this post is interesting/useful for a couple different reasons. One, the content is useful in and of itself. Second, the content reflects—in my opinion—the changing nature of what it means to be a “networking professional.” It’s not just about working with network device CLIs, but using APIs and interacting with both on-premises networking as well as cloud networking.

Servers/Hardware

• Much has been said about the “snappy” feel of Apple’s new M1-based Macs, and this article takes a look at how Quality of Service (QoS) across the efficiency and performance cores may be the reason why these new Macs seem so responsive.
• Here’s an entertaining tale of attempting to resurrect a Sun Ultra 1 Workstation.
• John Gruber’s post on “Secure Intent” on Apple devices was, for me at least, an informative read. I hadn’t delved that much into Apple’s hardware security efforts around Secure Enclave, mostly due to the fact that I was running older Apple hardware (a fact that has since changed).

Security

• Hari Rana has a detailed discussion of security concerns regarding Flatpak (a packaging format for Linux applications).
• Published back in January of this year, Sysdig’s container security and usage report reveals some interesting security trends.
• This is an interesting look at how someone managed to transmit arbitrary data via Apple’s “Find My” network.
• SentinelOne shares a list of “must-have” apps and tools for hackers working on a Mac.
• Ugh—a new Rowhammer exploit/technique. More details are available here.
• Want to learn more about X.509 certificates? Check this out.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• Sandy Cash has a two-part series on working with Kubernetes ConfigMaps (part 1 and part 2).
• Alessandro Perilli has a very lengthy article on NoOps. I love his different “paths” to NoOps (like “No(rmalized)Ops” or “No(tMy)Ops”).
• Rory McCune tackles the topic of permissions and RBAC in Kubernetes.
• Sam Weston takes a look at EKS Managed Node Groups, examining both the good and bad aspects of this functionality, and provides some sample configurations.
• I recently got turned on to Alex Mitelman’s System Design Weekly, which is like a super-cool version of Technology Short Takes but a bit more tightly focused. In any event, there’s a ton of great information available here, so I recommend checking it out.
• How about a tutorial on installing Cilium and Linkerd in a Kubernetes cluster? Here you go.
• For VMware-heavy customers, this post by Cormac Hogan that draws out the connections between the upstream Cluster API project and VMware’s TKG product may be helpful.

Operating Systems/Applications

• Michael Gasch has a nice post on git and using it to collaborate on an open source project. I was happy to see that many of the git practices I’ve adopted align with Michael’s recommendations, and learned a few new tricks along the way.

Programming

• Lee Briggs takes a look at Pulumi’s use of the Output type and the apply() method in writing declarative code using an imperative programming language.
• Ahmet Alp Balkan shows how to serve up gRPC and HTTP from a Go app on Cloud Run. I like reading posts like this, because even though I don’t necessarily understand all the code (yet) I feel like exposing me to the code is still helpful. I could be wrong; time will tell.
• AJ Stuyvenberg demonstrates how to use the serverless framework to enable and simplify the use of multiple stacks for developers and avoid trying to emulate cloud environments on laptops.

Virtualization

• Andrei Warkentin provides an update regarding ESXi-Arm (ESXi on ARM hardware).

Career/Soft Skills

• I enjoyed this article by Cat Swetel on the nature of power.
• Here are some tips for unshackling your education.
• I suspect this list of CRE “life lessons” from Google probably has some wisdom that can be applied in a variety of ways, not just in a CRE-specific context.

That’s all I have for now, but hopefully it’s enough to provide some helpful and useful reading over the weekend. I’m always open to hearing from readers, so feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, find me on Slack (I frequent the Kubernetes Slack instance), or send me an e-mail (my address isn’t hard to find). Thanks for reading!

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Read MoreTechnology Short Take 141

As part of an ongoing effort to refine my work environment, several months ago I switched to a Logitech Ergo K860 ergonomic keyboard. While I’m not a “keyboard snob,” I am somewhat particular about the feel of my keyboard, so I wasn’t sure how I would like the K860. In this post, I’ll provide my feedback, and provide some information on how well the keyboard works with both Linux and macOS.

Setup

Setting up the K860 is remarkably easy. The first system I tried to pair it with was an older Mac Pro workstation, and apparently the Bluetooth hardware on that particular workstation wasn’t new enough to support the K860 (Logitech indicates that Bluetooth 5.0 is needed; more on that in a moment). Instead, I popped in the USB-A wireless receiver, and was up and running with the K860 less than a minute later. This was using macOS, but the Mac Pro also dual-booted Linux, so I rebooted into Linux and found that the K860 with the Logitech-supplied USB receiver continued to work without any issues.

Linux, macOS, and Dual Boot Support

The key takeaway regarding Linux is this: if you’re interested in getting the K860 for use with Linux, the included USB wireless receiver works great. I had zero issues with the keyboard, and I really liked that Logitech provided a way to switch the keyboard back and forth between PC and macOS keyboard layouts (press and hold Fn+P to switch to a PC layout—Cmd becomes Alt, Option becomes Start—or press and hold Fn+O to switch to a Mac layout).

Although the wireless receiver worked flawlessly with both Linux and macOS, including across reboots with a dual-boot system, Bluetooth did not fare so well. To be honest, I didn’t expect it to. At some point after getting the K860, I upgraded the Bluetooth hardware in the Mac Pro and switched the keyboard from the wireless receiver to Bluetooth. With that configuration, I needed to switch between two different “connections” (the K860 can be connected to up to 3 devices and you can switch between them using special keys on the keyboard) when rebooting between Linux and macOS. As I said, this was not entirely unexpected. For folks who are considering dual-boot configurations, the wireless receiver may be the best approach.

Bluetooth

I mentioned earlier that Logitech specifies Bluetooth 5.0 as a requirement. I found this not to be entirely true; the keyboard paired and worked fine with a 2017 MacBook Pro, which identified itself as Bluetooth 4.2. That being said, the older Mac Pro, which identified itself as Bluetooth 2.0 before the Bluetooth hardware upgrade, didn’t work at all with the keyboard via Bluetooth, so there is definitely some sort of minimum Bluetooth requirement in play here. After the hardware upgrade on the Mac Pro to bring it up to Bluetooth 5.0, the K860 worked fine with that system.

Quality and Feel

The keyboard feels great. I like the responsiveness of the keys; touch typing is a pleasure. The noise from typing isn’t that loud, so if you’re a fan of a loud keyboard you may not like the K860. If you’re a huge fan of mechanical keyboards, you may not like this keyboard, either. Although I find that the keyboard provides more than sufficient tactile and auditory feedback, others may prefer more. Build quality seems fine; I haven’t noticed any issues with the keyboard. It’s solid and sits firmly on my desk. The padded wrist rest is enough to provide some additional support, but isn’t obnoxious enough to get in the way.

Summary

In summary, I’m happy with the K860. It took a little while to acclimate to the split keyboard layout, but after getting accustomed to it it’s really quite comfortable. The keyboard looks great (it goes well with my Space Gray Magic Trackpad 2), feels great, and works great. I guess you can’t really ask for much more than that, can you?

Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions, comments, or feedback. I love to hear from readers!

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Read MoreReview: Logitech Ergo K860 Ergonomic Keyboard