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    17 Jan, 2020
    Technology Short Take 123
    Cloud

    Welcome to Technology Short Take #123, the first of 2020! I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday season, but now it’s time to jump back into the fray with a collection of technical articles from around the Internet. Here’s hoping that I found something useful for you!

    Networking

    • Eric Sloof mentions the NSX-T load balancing encyclopedia (found here), which intends to be an authoritative resource to NSX-T load balancing configuration and management.
    • David Gee has an interesting set of articles exploring service function chaining in service mesh environments (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4).

    Servers/Hardware

    Security

    • On January 13, Brian Krebs discussed the critical flaw (a vulnerability in crypt32.dll, a core Windows cryptographic component) that was rumored to be fixed the next day (January 14) on the first “Patch Tuesday” of 2020. The next day, the Microsoft Security Response Center confirmed the vulnerability. Time to get patching, folks!
    • It’s good to see 1Password add support for U2F security keys for logging into your 1Password.com account via a web browser. Now I really want to see hardware security key support in the desktop and mobile apps!

    Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

    Operating Systems/Applications

    Storage

    Nothing this time around; I’ll try to find some content for next time!

    Virtualization

    Career/Soft Skills

    • Scott Driver talks about “the vCommunity” and some of the benefits that can be had, career-wise, from actively participating. Although Scott’s article focuses on the VMware-centric community, this is true (in my opinion) of many different communities, including various open source communities—and, to be frank, the physical communities in which we live and work.
    • Now that I’ve moved back onto macOS (see here for the explanation), I’m also taking OmniFocus back up, and so I found this article on using OmniFocus’ new Tags functionality helpful.
    • Thomas Maurer has some great tips for creating technical demos and presentations, although (I guess somewhat understandably given he works for Microsoft) the tips are a tad Windows-centric.

    I guess that’s all for now! Thanks for reading, and again I hope that you found something useful here. If you have feedback, suggestions for improvement, or just want to say hi, feel free to hit me up on Twitter. Thanks!

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    17 Jan, 2020
    Cloud service provider: Which questions should you be asking your CSP?
    Cloud , , , , , , , , , ,

    Cloud service provider: Which questions should you be asking your CSP?

    For most organisations, it is no longer a question of whether to adopt cloud, either wholly or for specific services, but which services to move and when to move them. Having architected and sized the chosen services, they then need to select the most appropriate cloud service provider(s). If they have done their preparation correctly, […]

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    16 Jan, 2020
    Removing Unnecessary Complexity
    Cloud

    Recently, I’ve been working to remove unnecessary complexity from my work environment. I wouldn’t say that I’m going full-on minimalist (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but I was beginning to feel like maintaining this complexity was taking focus, willpower, and mental capacity away from other, more valuable, efforts. Additionally, given the challenges I know lie ahead of me this year (see here for more information), I suspect I’ll need all the focus, willpower, and mental capacity I can get!

    When I say “unnecessary complexity,” by the way, I’m referring to added complexity that doesn’t bring any real or significant benefit. Sometimes there’s no getting around the complexity, but when that complexity doesn’t create any value, it’s unnecessary in my definition.

    Primarily, this “reduction in complexity” shows up in three areas:

    1. My computing environment
    2. My home office setup
    3. My lab resources

    My Computing Environment

    Readers who have followed me for more than a couple years know that I migrated away from macOS for about 9 months in 2017 (see here for a wrap-up of that effort), then again in 2018 when I joined Heptio (some details are available in this update). Since switching to Fedora on a Lenovo X1 Carbon when I joined Heptio, I was using Linux on the desktop full-time. (This post contains links to all the posts I wrote about my Linux migration.)

    About a month ago, though, I switched back to macOS (macOS Mojave, specifically). Why? Although I was making Linux work for me, there was just enough “extra friction” in daily tasks to make it more of a chore than I felt it needed to be:

    • E-mail connectivity to Office 365 was a challenge (my employer shut down IMAP/SMTP access to e-mail).
    • Calendaring was difficult, at best, and the shared calendar for my team totally confused most solutions I tried.
    • Interoperability between LibreOffice and Office 365 remained subpar (at best) for all but the most basic documents, unfortunately.

    Contrast that with macOS, where in a matter of minutes I had full connectivity to e-mail, full calendar access (including the shared team calendar), and a working version of Office 365. I also had multi-lingual support working with relative ease, something with which I suspect Linux desktop environments would’ve struggled.

    Although I had workable solutions (use a Windows 10 desktop on VMware View for some things, use the Office web applications for other aspects), these solutions still introduced what I felt was unnecessary complexity. So, to remove this unnecessary complexity, I switched back to macOS full-time.

    I also switched back to iOS (I bought an iPhone 11 Pro) from Android (I’d been using a Google Pixel). Given that I was moving back into the Apple ecosystem, and given that using an Android-powered phone had made it a bit more difficult to stay in touch with my wife when I was traveling, it didn’t seem to make sense to continue down that path. There was no significant benefit in exchange for the added friction.

    My Home Office Setup

    In addition to simplifying my computing environment, I also set out to simplify my home office setup. For years, I’d used both a 2012-era Mac Pro (one of the classic aluminum tower systems, which I’d purchased to help with video rendering) and a laptop, and used tools like Synergy (to have a single shared keyboard and mouse across both systems) and Unison (to keep files synchronized across both systems). In reality, though, I didn’t need the Mac Pro as a desktop system; I really needed it more like a server system to which I could offload rendering tasks.

    Around the same time I switched back to macOS, I also switched back to a single-computer setup. I no longer use Synergy to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple systems; instead, I have only my 2017 13” MacBook Pro. It uses a USB-C port replicator to connect to an external monitor (the same 34” 21:9 ultra-wide monitor I’d been using previously), external keyboard, external microphone and webcam, and USB-based headset for Zoom meetings. I use a small application named ControlPlane to automatically adjust settings based on whether the laptop is “docked” or not. Plug the laptop in, and it reconfigures itself; unplug it, and it automatically adapts.

    The Mac Pro sits off to the side; I’m still working out details on exactly how I’ll utilize it. It’s still running Linux (Fedora, specifically), and will most likely continue to do so; since it isn’t being used as a desktop system I see little value in moving back to macOS on that hardware. It’ll probably take over tasks from an aging Mac mini as well as helping with video rendering tasks, once I figure out the specific details on the best way to make that work.

    My Lab Resources

    Making mention of the aging Mac mini naturally leads me into the last area, my lab resources. This effort actually started a few years ago when I moved into my current home. Prior to that, I ran a full-fledged home lab: eight dual-socket Dell servers as hypervisors (a mix of KVM and ESXi), 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet with multiple VLANs, multiple VMs running for a variety of purposes. When I moved into the current house, though, I did away with all of it except the Mac mini and an Apple Time Capsule. Moving “up the stack” to focus on things like Linux containers and Kubernetes meant there wasn’t as much value in running all this hardware, and why spend time managing all that complexity if I didn’t really need to?

    Instead, I started leveraging ephemeral instances in AWS for everything I needed when it came to “lab resources.” Over the last few years, I’ve used that approach to strengthen and expand my skills around infrastructure-as-code. My current approach leverages Pulumi to manage a base set of AWS resources in multiple regions. Additional capacity is spun up on-demand, and shut down when it’s no longer actively needed. Since it’s almost exclusively Kubernetes I’m using, I leverage kubeadm and Cluster API to create and destroy Kubernetes clusters as needed. Yes, there are some limitations, but for the most part this arrangement has worked reasonably well.

    Anyone else undertaken a similar journey? I’d be interested to hear from you, and perhaps learn of some additional ways I may be able to simplify and eliminate unnecessary complexity. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, or drop me an e-mail (my e-mail address isn’t hard to find, to be honest). Thanks!

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    16 Jan, 2020
    How Technology Is Changing the Supply Chain as We Know It
    Cloud , , , , , , , , ,

    Technology Will Change the Supply Chain as we Know it

    The supply chain is no longer the rigid, human-centric protocol of the past. Instead of positioning real employees in every step of the process, more companies realize the value in supply chain automation. Not only does it free up employees for other areas, but next-gen automation might also be necessary to gain control over big […]

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