20
Mar, 2020
Technology Short Take 125
CloudWelcome to Technology Short Take #125, where I have a collection of articles about various data center and cloud technologies collected from around the Internet. I hope I have managed to find a few useful things for you! (If not, contact me on Twitter and tell me how I can make this more helpful for you.)
Networking
- Dinesh Dutt of Cumulus Networks writes about the effect of switch port count in Clos topologies.
- Tim Smith shares how to set up additional blocklists for Pi-Hole for your home lab.
- Matt Oswalt has a super-cool post on building your own JunOS router with cRPD and LinuxKit. Good stuff here! This blending of “traditional” network engineering with containers, Linux, and DevOps tooling is how Matt is setting new trends and directions for the networking industry.
Servers/Hardware
Nothing this time around. I’ll try hard to find something useful for the next Technology Short Take.
Security
- Chris Wahl touches on the topic of using GitHub personal tokens to authenticate to HashiCorp Vault.
- Guido Appenzeller—once my manager at VMware, now at Yubico—shared this article about the Cerberus banking trojan, which is apparently now able to steal two-factor authentication (2FA) tokens from the Google Authenticator application. Yikes.
- And while we are on the topic of Yubico: the company recently released this security advisory related to running a self-hosted one-time password (OTP) validation server. Note that the vulnerability discussed does not affect their most well-known product, the Yubikeys.
- Alexander Bakker discusses a mysterious bug in the firmware of Google’s Titan M chip.
- Mark Ermolov discusses a vulnerability in the ROM (read-only memory) of the Intel Converged Security and Management Engine (CSME).
- Aaron Parecki discusses the first draft of OAuth 2.1.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Paul Czarkowski has a post on creating self-signed certificates on Kubernetes.
- Pulumi recently introduced the ability to generate YAML from a supported programming language (like JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or .NET—Go support is coming soon). It feels like this implementation—and others like it, like
jk, which I wrote about here—are just syntactic differences, meaning you’re still writing the manifest. You’re just writing it in a different language/format than YAML. Maybe it’s just me. Convince me I’m wrong. - Eric Hammond has a great article on running AWS CLI commands across multiple accounts in an AWS organization. Lots of
bashhere, you’ve been forewarned. - Nigel Poulton has a list of
kubectltips here. - Keith Lee has a list of Cluster API resources you might want to check out. (I’ve been known to write a few Cluster API things as well.)
- Javier Aguilar takes readers through using CloudFormation to create a VPC with a NAT gateway.
- William Lam provides a sneak peek at deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS. I hope to publish something similar for “native” AWS soon.
- And here’s Joe Mann talking about deploying Kubernetes clusters to vSphere using Cluster API Provider for vSphere (CAPV) version 0.6.0 (which brings support for v1alpha3).
- Anne Currie has an update on the “climate friendliness” of various cloud providers.
Operating Systems/Applications
- Kornelis Sietsma looks at the options for working with multiple git identities on a single system.
- Michael Dales shares his experience trying out Windows 10 and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a Linux development environment.
- Robert Guske has a three-part series on running Linux development desktops with VMware Horizon (part 1, part 2, and part 3).
- Jeff Johnson talks about notarization and customer privacy in newer releases of macOS.
Storage
- Chin-Fah Heoh has a write-up from Storage Field Day 19 about a range of open source projects and initiatives related to storage.
- You can also go get your fill of storage-related links from J Metz.
Virtualization
- Hannel Hazeley of Microsoft shows how to set up nested virtualization for Azure VM/VHD. Hannel’s post also lays out a couple of use cases/scenarios for such a configuration.
- This is interesting, albeit more from a “science experiment” perspective than anything useful.
- Frank Denneman walks readers through the initial placement of a vSphere Pod (a vSphere Pod is a new construct available with “Project Pacific”).
Career/Soft Skills
- Jessica Dean shares her home office setup, which is applicable since so many folks are/will be working from home for a while. Her setup is a bit pricey for my budget, but still provides some useful ideas.
That’s all for now! I hope that you’ve found something useful. I welcome all feedback from readers, so I invite you to contact me on Twitter if you have corrections, feedback, suggestions for improvement, or just want to say hello.
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19
Mar, 2020
Using KinD with Docker Machine on macOS
CloudI’ll admit right up front that this post is more “science experiment” than practical, everyday use case. It all started when I was trying some Cluster API-related stuff that leveraged KinD (Kubernetes in Docker). Obviously, given the name, KinD relies on Docker, and when running Docker on macOS you generally would use Docker Desktop. At the time, though, I was using Docker Machine, and as it turns out KinD doesn’t like Docker Machine. In this post, I’ll show you how to make KinD work with Docker Machine.
By the way, it’s worth noting that, per the KinD maintainers, this isn’t a tested configuration. Proceed at your own risk, and know that while this may work for some use cases it won’t necessarily work for all use cases.
Prerequisites/Assumptions
These instructions assume you’ve already installed both KinD and Docker Machine, along with an associated virtualization solution. I’ll be using VirtualBox, but this should be largely the same for VMware Fusion or Parallels (or even HyperKit, if you somehow manage to get that working). I’m also assuming that you have jq installed; if not, get it here.
Making KinD work with Docker Machine
Follow the steps below to make KinD work with Docker Machine. In all the commands below, replace vm with whatever name you’re using, and remember to specify your virtualization driver (using -d) where necessary.
- Start your Docker Machine VM using
docker-machine start vm. - Set your Docker host to the Docker Machine VM using
eval $(docker-machine env vm). - Get the IP address of your Docker Machine VM using
docker-machine inspect vm | jq -r '.Driver.IPAddress'. Make a note of this IP address; you’ll need it shortly. -
Create a configuration file for KinD with the following contents, and make a note of the name (I’ll assume you called it
kind.yaml). Replace<insert-ip-address-here>with the IP address of your Docker Machine VM, obtained in the previous step.--- apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4 kind: Cluster networking: apiServerAddress: "<insert-ip-address-here>" -
Run
kind create cluster --config kind.yamlto stand up a Kubernetes cluster using the Docker daemon running in your Docker Machine VM. If you used a filename other thankind.yamlfor the file generated in the previous step, substitute that filename in thekind create clustercommand.
With the added configuration file specified in step 5, KinD will now generate a configuration that will work with Docker Machine. Once step 5 finishes, you should be able to use kubectl to interact with the local Kubernetes cluster created by KinD. Things like port forwarding and such may behave differently (I haven’t had time to extensively test and document the findings), so keep that in mind.
All things considered, though, it’s probably easier to just use Docker Desktop.
Additional Resources
I found this blog post by teammate John Harris to be enormously helpful, especially in my testing when I thought I’d have to use kubeadmConfigPatches to add a SAN to the API server’s certificate. (It turns out it isn’t needed.)
Contact me on Twitter or find me on the Kubernetes Slack instance if you have questions, corrections, suggestions for improvement, or if you just want to chat. Thanks!
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