Technology Short Take 88
Published on 14 Oct 2017 · Filed in Information · 719 words (estimated 4 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #88! Travel is keeping me pretty busy this fall (so much for things slowing down after VMworld EMEA), and this has made it a bit more difficult to stick to my self-imposed biweekly schedule for the Technology Short Takes (heck, I couldn’t even get this one published on Friday!). Sorry about that! Hopefully the irregular schedule is outweighed by the value found in the content I’ve collected for you.
Networking
- Christopher Davis has an article discussing a recommended VPC subnet configuration. This is, of course, just one way of handling subnets within a VPC, but some of the principles outlined in Christopher’s article are definitely sound.
- Speaking of VPCs and subnets, here’s an example of a Terraform module for a VPC with public, private, and internal subnets (similar to the article in the previous bullet).
- Prefer SaltStack to Terraform? No worries, Calvin Hendryx-Parker has an example of building AWS VPCs with SaltStack formulas.
- Phil Bedard (TME at Cisco) has a post discussing telemetry in Cisco IOS-XR.
- Fidelis Ekezue has a high-level “compare-and-constrast” between AWS VPCs and Azure VNETs. This article is pretty high-level; I wish it had a bit more depth to it.
- Abdullah Abdullah shares some thoughts on design decisions regarding NSX VXLAN control plane replication modes.
- Romain Decker has an “under the hood” look at the VMware NSX load balancer.
Servers/Hardware
Nothing this time (sorry!). I’ll keep an eye open for links to include next time around.
Security
- Mike Foley provides an overview of key manager concepts and topology basics for VM and vSAN encryption.
- If you’re studying for your CISSP, you might find this article helpful.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Mark Brookfield shares the fix for missing Puppet attributes on vRealize Automation blueprints.
- Jason Brooks has a write-up discussing how to run Kubernetes on Fedora Atomic Host. I haven’t had the opportunity to try this out yet, but hope to do so in the next few weeks.
- Via Joe Beda on Twitter, I saw this announcement from CloudFlare about service workers. Joe’s comment—“the merging of CDNs and cloud continues”—is pretty spot on, in my opinion.
- Colin Westwater discussing using Terraform with vSphere for “infrastructure as code”.
- Here’s a post on upgrading to OpenStack Pike using Kolla and Kayobe.
- Doug Smith outlines a completely “Docker-free” Kubernetes setup (leveraging
kpod,buildah, and CRI-O). - This graphical summary of the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) is pretty handy.
Operating Systems/Applications
- For those of you that might be a bit behind the times and still getting up to speed on containers, Ryan Kelly has a post describing containers for the vSphere admin.
- The popular open source container registry project, Harbor, has released a new version (version 1.2). This version introduces vulnerability scanning (leveraging the Clair project), and Henry Zhang has a blog post with more details.
- Brendan Gregg has a pretty detailed write-up on migrating from Solaris to Linux (pertinent given the recent layoff of the majority of the Solaris developers).
- If you’re not clear on the role/status of CRI-O, check out this article by Scott McCarty of Red Hat.
- Michael Friis provides more details on a recent big change to the Docker Official Images: they’re now multi-platform.
Storage
- Ben Evans has a four-part series (so far) on vSAN. The series provides an introduction and overview of licensing (part 1), a review of architecture and hardware recommendations (part 2), an overview of data availability (part 3), and a discussion of fault domains (part 4).
Virtualization
- Vladan Seget shares how to create a VMware ESXi ISO image with the latest patches.
- Richard Arnold shares some thoughts on VMware Cloud on AWS.
- Wouter Kursten shows how to use PowerCLI to add ESXi users when the host is in Lockdown Mode (and add them to the exception list).
Career/Soft Skills
- Joel Knight shares how he’s tried to blog more in 2017. There may be some tips here to help others seeking to “bulk up” on their blogging.
- Frank Milisi shares some information around stagnation and how to tell if you’re suffering from stagnation.
- John Allspaw has a great write-up on blameless post-mortems and a Just Culture. This is, in my humble opinion, a great article that all IT professionals need to read, digest, and apply to their own interactions with others.
That’s all for this time around. Thanks for reading!