Technology Short Take 112
Published on 19 Apr 2019 · Filed in Information · 685 words (estimated 4 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #112! It’s been quite a while since the last one, as life and work have been keeping me busy. I have, however, finally managed to pull together this list of links and articles from around the Internet, and I hope that something I’ve included here proves useful to readers.
Networking
- Part 2 of Stark and Wayne’s container-to-container networking for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes digs deep into CNI workings.
- Via Ivan Pepelnjak’s site, Albert Siersema shares some information on using Ansible to automate 802.1x configurations.
- Milind Gunjan shares some tips for troubleshooting Linux bridged networking on a KVM host.
Servers/Hardware
Nothing this time around! I’ll stay alert for content I can include next time.
Security
- Tim Hinrichs discusses securing the Kubernetes API with Open Policy Agent.
- Pod Security Policies (PSPs) are an important security feature in Kubernetes. Sysdig explains PSPs, and talks about
kube-psp-advisor, a tool to help simplify deploying PSPs. - ClusterScope is a handy tool for finding outdated images in your Kubernetes cluster.
- This article discusses four open source secrets management tools.
- Many organizations prefer to use two-factor authentication (2FA) to help protect their systems. While this article on how to configure 2FA for SSH on Fedora probably won’t work in many corporate environments (few use Fedora), it may provide enough information to figure out what it would look like in your environment.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Bahubali (Bill) Shetti walks through analyzing the cost of a self-managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS using VMware CloudHealth.
- Ahmet Alp Balkan does a deep dive on the KUBECONFIG file.
- Lee Briggs writes about his experience with Fargate. I think the key takeaway here is that prior experience always affects our perceptions and how we go about learning new technologies/acquiring new skills. My prior experience with hypervisors (vSphere, then KVM) affected how I learned Docker and containers. Lee’s prior experience with Kubernetes affected how he learned Fargate. Someone who’d worked quite a bit with Fargate would probably have a hard time switching to Kubernetes. An individual’s learning curve is strongly dictated by previous experience and knowledge.
- Ernese Norelus has an introductory piece on using Terraform and Ansible to enable repeatable infrastructure builds on AWS.
- Fernand Galiana introduces Popeye, a tool for finding and identifying misconfigurations in your Kubernetes cluster. I haven’t had the chance to give it a try yet, but it looks pretty interesting.
- Aeva talks a bit about what happened to OpenStack. Key excerpt (for me) from this article was this statement: “…creating a viable, open source, hyperscale cloud software solution was against the best interest of the companies most heavily investing in OpenStack’s development.”
Operating Systems/Applications
- Brian Christner talks about becoming a Docker “power user” with VS Code.
- John Harris explains how to use dynamic configuration discovery in Grafana.
- Matthias Eisner has written an article on custom XML objects in vRealize Orchestrator.
- Tonis Tiigi has a write-up on experimenting with rootless Docker over on the Docker Engineering blog. Pay close attention to the current caveats—some of them are significant (there’s a reason this is still experimental).
- I loved this “quick tip” on setting the default format for commands like
docker ps. Very handy! - There are some useful Bash tips here.
- Mark Church from Docker provides an update on Windows containers with Docker and Kubernetes, specifically calling out the support for Windows node as of the Kubernetes 1.14 release. Here’s Microsoft’s side of the same announcement.
Storage
Nothing this time. Have something you think I should share here? Let me know on Twitter.
Virtualization
- Larry Smith Jr. shares some information learned in building nested ESXi templates.
Career/Soft Skills
- This blog post from XMind has some nice tips on staying focused in the workspace.
- I really enjoyed this discussion on deep work and real-time collaboration. Cal’s book is in the “To Read” pile on my desk; guess I need to hurry up and get to it!
That’s all for now—stay tuned for future Tech Short Takes, as I’m striving to be more regular with publishing them. In the meantime, feel free to contact me on Twitter with any comments, suggestions, corrections, or other feedback.