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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22
Dec, 2019
VMware Octant
VMware KubernetesAs I have been discovering more with K8s, I have been growing to be a fan of VMware Octant. As defined by the open source project:
A highly extensible platform for developers to better understand the complexity of Kubernetes clusters.
Octant is a tool for developers to understand how applications run on a Kubernetes cluster. It aims to be part of the developer’s toolkit for gaining insight and approaching complexity found in Kubernetes. Octant offers a combination of introspective tooling, cluster navigation, and object management along with a plugin system to further extend its capabilities.
The reason I like Octant is that it allows me to visualize my K8s environment very easily. I can see all of my deployments, Replica Sets, Daemon sets, Pods, Replication Controllers, jobs and almost every other K8s Construct in a visual presentation. It can be of a great value as well to K8s newbies to understand K8s constructs. As it allows them to visualize the effects and changes completed by running a particular Kubectl command.
Here is few examples of the useful screens that you can find in Octant. Here is the Octant overview tab listing a summary of Deployments, Replica Sets, Jobs, Pods, Services, Ingress Controllers and more.… Read More
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