Welcome to Technology Short Take #181! The summer of 2024 is nearly over, and Labor Day rapidly approaches. Take heart, though; here is some reading material for your weekend. From networking to security and from hardware to the cloud, there’s something in here for just about everyone. Enjoy!

Networking

• Leon Adato has a great piece on transitioning from being a network engineer to being a cloud engineer. The post links to some good resources, and Leon provides three quick “lessons” to help folks get started.
• Geoff Huston discusses DNS and UDP truncation.
• Ivan Pepelnjak examines when you might need to use BGP, EVPN, VXLAN, or SRv6.

Servers/Hardware

• Permanent damage? No recall? Ouch! Sean Hollister discusses Intel’s responses to questions asked about instabilities in their 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core desktop processors.
• Chaim Gartenberg shares a look back at 10 years of Google’s AI-specialized chips (the Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs).

Security

• I enjoy Ben Bornholm’s article showing how to use Cilium and Tetragon to secure a vulnerable web application. Practical examples like this are useful. Thanks for sharing, Ben!
• Writing for The Hacker News, Ravie Lakshmanan discusses CRYSTALRAY and a recent surge of infections aiming “to harvest and sell credentials, deploy cryptocurrency miners, and maintain persistence in victim environments.”
• Also via The Hacker News, I saw this article about Singapore banks phasing out OTPs (one-time passwords). I was a bit surprised, to be honest, but the news in the article of sophisticated toolkits aimed at harvesting OTPs provides some explanation why this is happening.
• While patches mitigating the underlying vulnerability are available (the article is from April 2024), this post on how folks can use Tetragon to detect exploits like the one used by XZ Utils/CVE 2024-3094 is (to me) informative.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• It’s an older post, sir, but it checks out: Seth Miles shares his experience from 2021 in building a Cilium-powered EKS cluster using Bottlerocket. Seth uses eksctl in his post, but I verified it using Pulumi (and I hope to be able to share the Pulumi program I used shortly).
• Matt Gowie of Masterpoint shares some experience as an early adopter of OpenTofu.
• Piotr Jastrzebski shares a quick but effective way to optimize GitHub Actions usage.
• Jim Bugwadia shares some techniques for applying the DRY principle to Kyverno policies. I believe a trade-off between DRY and readability exists; emphasizing DRY over readability has the potential for some issues. I am not an expert, though, so feel free to disagree. (Although it would be awesome if you reached out to me to explain why you disagree!)
• Eleni Grosdouli shares a way of deploying and controlling Ciilum on an EKS cluster using Sveltos. Before finding this article, I was not aware of Sveltos.
• Running Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE)? Here’s a write-up on enhancing OKE security with Cilium Network Policy.

Operating Systems/Applications

• Bhushan Shah shares some “lessons learned” using git bisect to do some Linux kernel troubleshooting.
• Run macOS software on Linux? I saw Darling described on social media as “WINE, but for macOS”. Anyway, it’s intended to let you run macOS software in a “Darwin emulation/translation” layer on Linux. Nice!
• Andreas Scherbaum reviews a recent change in some Arch Linux packaging around the replacement of BDB with LMDB in the Postfix.
• Kien Nguyen-Tuan reviews testing Ansible with Molecule.
• Chris Wood shares their experience using Linux as a UX designer.

Storage

• William Lam tries to get folks excited about NVMe tiering in vSphere 8 Update 3. I’ll admit this looks like a pretty cool feature.

Virtualization

• Stine Elise Larsen writes about an easily-missed requirement for port 9087 to be open between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts when using vSphere Lifecycle Manager.

Career/Soft Skills

• This doesn’t really pertain to a “soft skill,” exactly, but the focus of the article is a career skill that many folks feel is important: accounting. Yes, you read that right. It’s important to know basic accounting principles, especially for developers building products that move and track money. Check out this guide to accounting for developers.

That’s all for now, folks! I love hearing from readers, so if you have thoughts about any of the links I’ve shared—or maybe you have a link or two of your own you think I should include in the next Technology Short Take—drop me a line! You can reach me via e-mail (my address is on this site, not too terribly hard to find to be honest), you can contact me on Twitter, you can reach me on the Fediverse, or you can hit me up in one of the Slack communities I regularly visit.