Welcome to Technology Short Take #149! I’ll have one more Technology Short Take in 2021, scheduled for three weeks from now (on the last day of the year!). For now, though, I have a small collection of articles and links for your reading pleasure—not as many as I usually include in a Technology Short Take, but better than nothing at all (I hope!). Enjoy!

Networking

• Thomas Graf recently shared how eBPF will eliminate sidecars in service mesh architectures (he also announces the Cilium Service Mesh beta in the same post). I have many thoughts here—but I will reserve those thoughts until I’ve had time to do a bit more reading and research.
• Ivan tackles the topic of CI/CD and testing in network automation.

Security

• Dan Lorenc dives deep into Fulcio.
• From the Not Surprised Department, some folks are starting to take a harder look at the timelines for security patches for older versions of macOS compared to newer versions. Ars Technica has a write-up on what’s been observed so far.
• Rory McCune of Aqua shares some new security-related features in the Kubernetes 1.23 release.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• I shared this via Twitter as well, but this is so useful I wanted to include it here. Ivan Velichko wrote up his container learning path and shared it for others who may need to follow a similar path. I wish I’d had this years ago!
• Xavier Avrillier digs into the Cluster API Provider for vSphere in this post.
• Baptiste Collard has a post on Kubernetes controllers for AWS load balancers. One takeaway from this post for me was that the new AWS load balancer controller uses a ton of annotations.
• Tetrate has a post on the new WASM-based extensions that are available in Istio 1.12.
• Michael Heap shares how to deploy a Kong Gateway data plane with Pulumi.
• In this post, Piotr talks about the “next big shift” in infrastructure as code, but what he’s really discussing is Crossplane. I really dig Crossplane, but I don’t know if I would refer to it as the “next big shift” in infrastructure as code.
• I was recently digging into OpenTelemtry a little bit and found this page helpful (among several others on this site).
• In the event you missed this in the barrage of AWS re:Invent announcements, I thought it was worth pointing out that you can now use Amazon ECR Public to get Docker Official images.

Operating Systems/Applications

• Olivier Miossec shows how to use container groups to run multiple containers in a single Azure Container Instance.
• Running Kong Gateway or Kuma service mesh in your environment and also using Grafana? I recently learned that there are a series of Grafana dashboards you can use!
• Here’s a handy Bash tip from Nick Janetakis.

Virtualization

• Eric Sloof drew my attention to a VMware white paper on paravirtual RDMA devices on vSphere.
• James Hamilton discusses running Xen on AWS Nitro to support legacy instances.

That’s all for now. I hope you have a great weekend! If you have feedback for me, or if you just want to say hi, hit me on Twitter or find me on any of the various Slack communities I frequent (the Kubernetes Slack community is one great option). Thanks for reading!