Technology Short Take 116
Published on 5 Jul 2019 · Filed in Information · 631 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #116! This one is a bit shorter than usual, due to holidays in the US and my life being busy. Nevertheless, I hope that I managed to capture something you find useful or helpful. As always, your feedback is welcome, so if you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, you’re welcome to contact me via Twitter.
Networking
- David Gee discusses jSNAPy and how it can be used to enable unit tests in infrastructure-as-code scenarios.
- Jon Langemak tackles understanding RTs (Route Targets) and RDs (Route Distinguishers) are in MPLS VPNs. I also appreciate that Jon included a “Lab time” section in his article that encourages readers to try out the concepts he’s explaining.
Servers/Hardware
- Although I’ve by and large moved away from Apple hardware (I still have a MacBook Pro running macOS that sees very little use, and a Mac Pro running Fedora), I did see this article regarding a new keyboard for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. That’s good—the butterfly keyboards are awful (in my opinion).
Security
- If you’re unfamiliar with public key infrastructure (PKI), digital certificates, or encryption, you may find this Linux Journal article helpful. It provides the basics behind X.509v3 digital certificates, how they help enable asymmetric (public/private key) encryption, and the connection to Transport Layer Security (TLS). Plus, there are some handy
opensslcommands! - As would be expected with any maturing open source project that is starting to see increased adoption, Kubernetes has seen its share of security vulnerabilities over the last couple of months. This article talks about a recent vulnerability in the
kubectlcommand, which is typically used to interact with Kubernetes clusters. - Lennart Koopmann provides a guide to Yubikey authentication in the real world.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Myles Gray takes an early look at the Kubernetes ClusterAPI provider for vSphere in this post.
- Anthony Spiteri takes a few moments to talk about his journey from working directly with the REST APIs of certain infrastructure products to using an infrastructure-as-code tool. While each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, it’s definitely true that most infrastructure-as-code tooling is far easier to approach than working with REST APIs directly.
- Audun Føyen describes how his company settled on the use of
kustomizefor managing their Kubernetes manifests. - This blog post outlines some of the changes/new features in
kubeadmwith the Kubernetes 1.15 release, including expanded support for streamlining the setup of HA control planes. - David O’Brien has a write-up on Azure Bastion, Microsoft’s new “bastion-as-a-service” offering.
Operating Systems/Applications
- There’s been a fair amount of talk about “GitOps,” particularly in the Kubernetes space, and this recent article by Weaveworks goes into a bit more detail about what GitOps is and what it seeks to achieve.
- Chris Humphries shares his experience in using OpenBSD as his workstation.
Storage
- Kubernetes 1.15 introduces alpha support for volume cloning. John Griffith of Red Hat provides more details in this blog post on the Kubernetes web site. There are some notable caveats for this alpha support (CSI drivers only, same storage class, same namespace), but all these are laid out in Griffith’s article.
- Vito Botta provides a few tips for OpenEBS.
Virtualization
- Mischa Buijs reviews using a SATADOM boot device with VMware ESXi.
Career/Soft Skills
- Working effectively as a remote employee or as part of a distributed team is increasingly important. Via Chris Short, I saw this CircleCI blog talking about some best practices they’ve discovered/created for their distributed team. There’s a few good ideas here that may be worth exploring in your situation or team as well.
- I liked David Varnum’s article on applying essentialism to certifications and skills development. In other words, you can’t know/learn everything, so be smart about where you choose to apply your time, focus, and attention.
That’s all for now. Enjoy your weekend!