Technology Short Take 123

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

• Frank Denneman has a nice article aimed at helping readers understand PCIe device to NUMA Node Locality.
• Guiliano Bertello introduces PowerVCF, a PowerCLI module aimed at interacting with the SDDC Manager and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack. (If you’re not familiar with VCF, see here.)
• This is pricey, but I can’t say I don’t want one.
• James Hamilton is back with a post on the AWS Graviton2 ARM processors.

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

• The Grafana folks have introduced Tanka, a new tool aimed a simplifying the task of managing Kubernetes manifests. While I’m sure that the use of jsonnet may appeal to some users, I’m not sure it’s going to appeal to “the masses,” so to speak.
• Eric Shanks has a good walkthrough on setting up a Kubernetes cluster on AWS with the AWS cloud provider enabled. It’s a nice companion/supplement/partner article to my own post on the same topic (which, although it specifically mentions 1.15, should still work with 1.16 and 1.17 as well).
• My colleague Dan Finneran discusses designing and building HA Kubernetes clusters on bare metal.
• Here’s a list of Kubernetes tools.
• HashiCorp recently announced the expansion of their Terraform Module Registry to include providers (and renaming the service to the Terraform Registry). Read more details here.
• Sam McGeown explains how he uses GitLab pipelines to deploy his Hugo-based site to AWS. Oh, and you might also enjoy Nicolas Fränkel’s post outlining his blogging stack and publishing process.
• How about a bash “wrapper” for working with AWS resources from the command line? See here.
• Chris Evans posits that AWS is not building hybrid cloud, and I must say I can’t really disagree with his reasoning.

Operating Systems/Applications

• As of January 14, Windows 7 is now End of Life (EOL), as pointed out here by Sergiu Gatlan.
• This is kind of cool.
• Casey McMullen takes readers through a step-by-step guide to use Docker containers to do local development for PHP, MySQL, and Redis. Readers can, of course, extrapolate from the concepts presented here to include other development environments. If you’re a non-developer wondering why containers are getting so much attention, read this article and try to see it from a developer’s perspective.
• Giovanni Collazo shares how to configure iTerm2 to recognize macOS-specific keyboard shortcuts.
• Steve Sloka talks about new features in the Contour 1.1 release.
• I’m just getting started learning Golang, and already other folks are talking about moving to Rust. I’m so far behind.

Storage

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

Virtualization

• William Lam keeps everyone updated regarding running ESXi on the 2019 Mac Pro.

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!