It was indeed KubeCon EU this week. What my family is told is one of my Super Bowl events (KubeCons and Red Hat Summit are in that class). It was indeed an extraordinary virtual event. That’s right; you read that right. KubeCon EU 2021 was a great virtual event. No one besides Deserted Island DevOps and CNCF has unlocked successful models of making a virtual event enjoyable.
As a speaker, I did not test anything until thirty minutes before the talk on Friday morning. After 530+ hours of live streaming, if I couldn’t figure it out in thirty minutes, it was beyond fixing. I found the tooling I needed after logging in, and we were off to the virtual races. Incorporating Slack as a primary communication medium made a ton of sense. Having great content running on Twitch and a dedicated virtual track made for an excellent experience outside of the virtual event platform. I was impressed.
There was one embarrassing announcement from a KubeCon vendor/sponsor, though. Talos Systems announced COSI, the Common Operating System Interface. But… Um… There’s already a COSI in Kubernetes; Container Object Storage Interface (also mentioned in DevOps’ish 215). Oops! I know naming things is hard but, this is a gross error. No one was aware of the Kubernetes projects. I mean it was in this newsletter two weeks ago. A DuckDuckGo search for Kubernetes COSI returns numerous Container Object Storage Interface results and one new entry for Talos Systems Common Operating System Interface. I would like to see this fixed to reduce any confusion in an already crowded landscape. Container Object Storage Interface should keep its name. It’s closer to the core Kubernetes project and was the first to go public if you will. Talos Systems, you’ve got to do the right thing here and rename your product.
Note: All KubeCon EU 2021 talks will be available on YouTube on May 14th.
People
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GitOps Con 2021
Hosting the inaugural GitOps Con was an absolute blast. Being in charge of the playlist meant all videos were live almost as soon as the event was over.
The Next Step after DevOps and GitOps Is Cloud Engineering, Pulumi Says
Pulumi is making big waves. But, I feel like Pulumi is also addressing a fraction of who they could be. This is an interesting prediction. We’ll all be makers of clouds.
xkcd: Vaccinated
Making friends was already hard enough. I have noticed I’ve become distant from almost all my friends. It’s weird to talk to people, not knowing if or when you’ll ever see them again.
Continuous Learning as a Tool for Adaptation
“Developing a learning organization is a competitive advantage, and leaders who study, encourage, and understand what it means to develop this kind of organization are well-positioned to achieve stronger collaboration and team dynamics under pressure.”
Process
Cyberattack Forces a Shutdown of a Top U.S. Pipeline
“The operator, Colonial Pipeline, said it had halted systems for its 5,500 miles of pipeline after being hit by a ransomware attack.” I’ve driven along this pipelines path numerous times in my life east and west on I-40 in North Carolina. The fact it had to halt operations of nearly half the US east coast’s fuel supplies is an insanely high cost to pay for a ransomware attack. I’ve got a bad feeling the US is going to start using these elite special forces units coming home from overseas in other ways soon. If the US goes kinetic to defend cyberspace, we’re talking really uncharted territory.
Cloud Native Security Day, Capture The Flag
This was one of the highlights of my KubeCon experience (originally on Twitch with audience and participant engagement). I learned, I suggested, I learned a little more. This was very cool.
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Is Docker Dead in the Water?
Some of us have thought this since 2017. In general, it seems the author hasn’t followed Docker the company as closely as the technology. But, it is a worthwhile read.
Amazon VPC Announces Pricing Change for VPC Peering
Like, this was overdue. “Starting May 1st 2021, all data transfer over a VPC Peering connection that stays within an Availability Zone (AZ) is now free. All data transfer over a VPC Peering connection that crosses Availability Zones will continue to be charged at the standard in-region data transfer rates. You can use the Availability Zone-ID to uniquely and consistently identify an Availability Zone across different AWS accounts.”
Why positioning matters for open source software
“Positioning is important whether you are trying to build a community of people who pay you money or trying to build a community of people who will pay you with their time (ie contribute to your open source project).”
Tools
Introducing PodTopologySpread
“Managing Pods distribution across a cluster is hard. The well-known Kubernetes features for Pod affinity and anti-affinity, allow some control of Pod placement in different topologies. However, these features only resolve part of Pods distribution use cases: either place unlimited Pods to a single topology, or disallow two Pods to co-locate in the same topology. In between these two extreme cases, there is a common need to distribute the Pods evenly across the topologies, so as to achieve better cluster utilization and high availability of applications.”
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Welcome to StackRox.io and the StackRox community
StackRox going open source is going to be amazing. Be on the ground floor and get involved now.
Using CoreDNS Effectively with Kubernetes
Please read this if you manage DNS for anything.
Iter8
AI-driven Kubernetes experimentation platform: Iter8 makes it easy to optimize business metrics and validate SLOs when you release new versions of Kubernetes apps/ML models.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Grants Spotify the Top End User Award
Meanwhile, Corey Quinn was shitting all over it.
Open Policy Agent: The Top 5 Kubernetes Admission Control Policies
“Note: Each of the sample policies below can be implemented via Open Policy Agent (OPA), the de facto policy engine for cloud native (open source).” That’s a mighty high horse you’re on.
Accurics Announces Argo Integration for Open Source Terrascan
Dropping Terrascan right into Argo will make for more secure pipelines. Make it happen folks, Accurics is legit.
PlayStation invests in Discord and plans integration with PSN in 2022
Shit just got real awkward for teams using Discord.
My Favorite One Liners
This is inspiring me to create my own list.
Eunomia
Kohl’s GitOps platform
pixie-labs/pixie
Instant Kubernetes-Native Application Observability
utkuozdemir/pv-migrate
Persistent volume migration plugin for Kubernetes
DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week
Want more? Be sure to check out the notes from this week’s issue to see what didn’t make it to the newsletter but are still worth your time.