Technology Short Take 177
Published on 17 May 2024 · Filed in Information · 723 words (estimated 4 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #177! Wow, is it the middle of May already? The year seems to be flying by—much in the same way that all these technical articles keep flying by my Inbox, occasionally getting caught and included here! In this Technology Short Take, I have links on things ranging from physical network designs to running retro operating systems as virtual machines. Surely there will be something useful in here for you!
Networking
- Blogger Evert has a two part series (here and here) on managing NSX ALBs with Terraform.
- Ivan launches a series of blog posts exploring routing protocol designs that can be used to implement EVPN-with-VXLAN L2VPNs in a leaf-and-spine fabric. The first one is here. What’s really cool is that Ivan also includes a
netlabtopology readers can use to create a lab and see how it works. - Eduard Tolosa discusses binding wireless network adapters to
systemd-nspawncontainers. - Ioannis Theodoridis has a three-part series on how he and his team used tools like Nautobot, Nornir, and Python to help with some extensive network migrations. Check out the series (part 1, part 2, and part 3); I think you’ll find some useful information in there.
Servers/Hardware
- While in many respects Apple’s M series CPUs are amazing, all is not perfect: security researchers have discovered a flaw that would allow attackers to steal cryptographic keys. More details are available in this Zero Day article.
Security
- Rory McCune explores using Tailscale for getting persistence in a compromised Kubernetes cluster.
- The Cisco Talos team is warning of large-scale brute force attacks against VPN and SSH services on a variety of devices (including Cisco, CheckPoint, Fortinet, SonicWall, and Ubiquiti).
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Open Policy Agent (OPA) is approaching their 1.0 release, and they’ve already started discussing what users can do today to prepare for the big release. I must say I appreciate the OPA team’s efforts in making the transition to 1.0 as smooth and seamless as possible.
- A colleague shared this article on CPU limits and throttling in Kubernetes.
- Anton Weiss of PerfectScale explores memory QoS with EKS and Bottlerocket.
- Brian Grant explores the question of whether GitOps is actually useful.
- Via this blog post on the Docker web site, Diana Esteves of Pulumi shares how to use the new Docker Build provider to automate image builds. It also looks like the Pulumi team has added a Docker Build example to their “examples” repository. C’mon, Pulumi team—show us more than just TypeScript!
Operating Systems/Applications
- Julia Evans digs into what “current branch” means in Git.
- Nikhil shares a framework for selecting a Linux distribution.
- José Ignacio Amelivia Santiago takes readers on a detailed walkthrough of setting up Arch Linux on a new Framework 13 AMD-based laptop.
- Here’s a list of “crisis tools” recommended to install on your Linux servers before you need them.
- Only one word applies here: oops.
- I found this tool in the last couple of weeks, and it is so absolutely useful (to me, anyway).
- Envoy Gateway has officially released version 1.0.0, marking GA for the project. More details are available in this announcement.
Programming/Development
- This is a fantastic article by Jeremiah Lee about Spotify’s failed “squad model” and some of the key lessons folks can learn.
Storage
- Steven Sklar explains how CSI (Container Storage Interface) works.
Virtualization
- Talk about a blast from the past! William Lam discusses running a prerelease version of OS/2 2.0—an operating system I myself ran in the mid-1990s before switching to Windows NT—as a virtual machine on VMware ESXi. For what it’s worth, I remain convinced that OS/2 version 2 was technologically superior to its Windows peers (including Windows NT). It’s another example of when the best technology doesn’t always win.
Career/Soft Skills
- If you’re looking for a list of skills that are valuable for a DevOps engineer/SRE/platform engineer to know, look no further than this comprehensive list from Nick Janetakis.
OK, that’s all for this time around. Did you like this post, or another post on the site? Or maybe you have a question? Feel free to reach out! I always enjoy hearing from readers, so I invite you to find me on Twitter, on the Fediverse, or in one of the various Slack communities I frequent. (You can drop me an e-mail, if you’d prefer—my address isn’t too hard to find.) Thanks for reading!