Technology Short Take 110
Published on 1 Feb 2019 · Filed in Information · 609 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #110! Here’s a look at a few of the articles and posts that have caught my attention over the last few weeks. I hope something I’ve included here is useful for you also!
Networking
- Via Kirk Byers (who is himself a fantastic resource), I read a couple of articles on network automation that I think readers may find helpful. First up is a treatise from Mircea Ulinic on whether network automation is needed. Next is an older article from Patrick Ogenstad that provides an introduction to ZTP (Zero Touch Provisioning).
- The folks over at Cilium took a look at a recent CNI benchmark comparison and unpacked it a bit. There’s some good information in their article.
- I first ran into Forward Networks a few years ago at Fall ONUG in New York. At the time, I was recommending that they explore integration with NSX. Fast-forward to this year, and the company announces support for NSX and (more recently) support for Cisco ACI. The recent announcement of their GraphQL-based Network Query Engine (NQE)—more information is available in this blog post—is also pretty interesting to me.
Servers/Hardware
- Patrick Kennedy over at Serve The Home shares the story of the Ultra EPYC AMD-powered Sun Ultra 24 workstation. Fun read!
Security
- Maarten Goet has a few recommendations on securing Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Lior Kamrat has an article on securing Azure Container Registry for CI/CD pipelines using Azure service principals.
- Christopher Damerau explains how to use Ansible to manage VMware resources. The article is a bit high-level, and most readers will need to seek out other resources for more details.
- Graham Moore shares some of his experiences and recommendations after 90 days of AWS EKS in production.
- Tobias Zimmergren shows how to enable Azure Monitor for your AKS clusters.
- And while we’re on the topic of AKS, AKS developer Weinong Wang shares how to access control plane logs for AKS. (Note: Weinong doesn’t mention in his article that a specific feature flag must be enabled on the Azure subscription in order to see AKS audit logs, but the official docs do.)
- Panagiotis Georgiadis explains how to enable PSP (Pod Security Policies) with Traefik.
Operating Systems/Applications
- Jorge Castro shares some informal notes on using Clear Linux as an everyday DevOps/cloud-native/Kubernetes client.
- Dylan Tientcheu has a list of “super secret” Visual Studio Code hacks to improve productivity.
- Jessie Frazelle’s post on pipes captures many of my own thoughts perfectly.
- Aleksa Sarai dives deep into
tarand its challenges when used for container image formats in this article on the path to OCI v2 images. - Megan O’Keefe shares a Kubernetes developer workflow for macOS that includes a list of applications, themes, tools, and shortcuts. There’s some handy tips/ideas in here.
Storage
- Jeff Hunter launches what appears to be a series on vSAN capacity management and monitoring with part 1, found here.
Virtualization
- Myles Gray explains how to create an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS cloud image that will work with Guest OS Customization in vSphere.
Career/Soft Skills
- I’ve talked before about how I use mind maps as a brainstorming or thought exploration process. After reading this article from XMind on 9 mind mapping mistakes beginners make, I realized I make some of these mistakes as well. Here’s to improving!
OK, that’s all for now. I’ll have another Tech Short Take in a few weeks, and hopefully I can finally publish some of the original content I’ve been working on. Feel free to contact me on Twitter if you’d like to chat, if you have a questions, or if you have suggestions for content I should include in the future. Thanks!