DevOps'ish 257: Kubernetes dockershim removal work, shades of DevOps, signal jamming is still illegal (in most places), CKA tips, PostgreSQL horrors, Kubernetes on a PS4, and more

I spent a lot of time working on the dockershim removal documentation effort. These docs are vitally important to our community. These updates often require some technical hands to get things figured out. First, many people have to be very specific and finite in their language with Docker and Kubernetes. Yes, it’s cringe-worthy how often you say anything potentially harmful about Docker, and people think, “the entire container ecosystem will collapse without the existence of this one company.” It shows how the learning paths to Kubernetes must be improved upon. Yes, you might need Docker Engine to get containers running on your Mac or Windows laptop. But, all the CRI implementations are containerd (or CRI-O) now when you get into production. containerd is a graduated CNCF project (and is the default CRI in Kubernetes), and CRI-O is an incubating project. If you notice, Docker, Docker Engine, and anything else with the word docker do not appear on the CNCF projects page. There’s a long story there. The internet shock and awe factory is real. It takes people with some battle hardening around the Docker topic to write some of these docs. ...

February 20, 2022 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 256: EARN IT Act is back and worse than ever, SSD chip contamination, technical debt, SBOMs, Tools for Securing Your Kubernetes Cluster, ValidKube, and more

I hope your week was wonderful, and you’re looking forward to the week ahead. I had the honor of being named a Continuous Delivery Foundation Ambassador this along (alongside the CNCF Ambassador title). Also, I began my official duties as a co-chair on the GitOps Working Group/OpenGitOps projects. “Why?!? Aren’t you busy enough???” One might understandably ask themselves. My GitOps partner in crime, Christian Hernandez, and I realized this odd alignment between GitOps and the organizations to help it grow. CNCF and CDF both have their hands in software delivery. We both applied with the premise of bridging and hopefully connecting the two foundations’ GitOps positioning. I look forward to participating in both communities equally under the GitOps umbrella. It’s going to be a fun ride. The CFP for GitOpsCon EU ends MONDAY at 11:59 PM PST. Submit your talks now!!! DevOps’ish is brought to you our friends at Honeycomb. “Stop Letting Complexity Slow You Down” Honeycomb makes it easy to understand and troubleshoot complex relationships within your distributed services. Solve problems faster. Ship reliable and performant features. SPONSORED ...

February 13, 2022 · 7 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 255: Open source operational transparency, npm security, Blackberry sells off patents, Samba vuln, Minecraft server in 10, GitOps Terraform controller for Kubernetes, and more

DevOps’ish is brought to you our friends at Honeycomb. “Stop Letting Complexity Slow You Down” Honeycomb makes it easy to understand and troubleshoot complex relationships within your distributed services. Solve problems faster. Ship reliable and performant features. SPONSORED People There Is a Much Larger Problem Than the Great Resignation. No One Wants to Talk About It. It’s okay to go to a two-year school and build up some experience to increase your value. That’s what I did. I insisted on touching keyboards more and more. North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet “P4x says he has largely automated his attacks on the North Korean systems, periodically running scripts that enumerate which systems remain online and then launching exploits to take them down. ‘For me, this is like the size of a small-to-medium pentest,’ P4x says, using the abbreviation for a ‘penetration test,’ the sort of whitehat hacking he’s carried out in the past to reveal vulnerabilities in a client’s network. ‘It’s pretty interesting how easy it was to actually have some effect in there.’” ...

February 6, 2022 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 254: Mired in many migrations, No Substack, Kubernetes security, Nvidia's Arm deal is really dead, big Kubernetes cluster, systemd playground, and more

DevOps’ish is brought to you by Honeycomb. “Stop Letting Complexity Slow You Down” Honeycomb makes it easy to understand and troubleshoot complex relationships within your distributed services. Solve problems faster. Ship reliable and performant features. SPONSORED I mentioned on Twitter this week that I have multiple migrations going on right now. The first and easiest migration is already done. I even wrote a blog post about it: Moving off Spotify. The next migration is moving off GSuite or Google Workplace or whatever it’s called. That one is technically 50% done as far as the two GSuite accounts I have. I migrated one over to Apple+. The Apple tooling is rigid and unforgiving. It will likely instruct you to make a bad SPF record if you send mail using more than one tool. I intend to write a blog post about it during the coming weeks. The funny thing about it is that I moved the Google account I was already paying for. Now I have to move the one with the data gravity, but I have until July to do that. I am lucky and maintain a firm policy not to sign in with a Google account unless I am forced. But, to be honest, not moving, taking the easy path, even if it costs money, is likely the path I’ll take for the legacy free account. I’ll only pay for ONE Google account, though. ...

January 30, 2022 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 253: 5G — It's all good, Measuring open source, Intel coming to Ohio, MoonBounce, GitOps in 2021, Google SRE hellscape, and more

DevOps’ish is brought to you by Honeycomb. “Stop Letting Complexity Slow You Down” Honeycomb makes it easy to understand and troubleshoot complex relationships within your distributed services. Solve problems faster. Ship reliable and performant features. SPONSORED 5G became an absolute shit show this week. But, at the end of it all, Airline CEOs made a 180-degree turn and are now saying 5G isn’t a big problem for altimeters. They are a few 100 megahertz apart. But, the summary might piss you off, “After stalling for almost two years, FAA cleared 78% of planes in the past week.” I’m pretty sure the FAA has had a tumultuous past couple of years like many other employers. Productivity and staffing issues were probably significant limitations. You can’t work in a lab if you can’t go into the building. There’s only so much simulating you can do before you need to make sure you’re not going to kill a test pilot and need to touch the hardware in test conditions. Those skills are probably in high demand right now too. But, when you get the President’s attention, you get what you need in government. That’s how it works (I didn’t say it was right; it’s politics, and I’ve been there and done that). ...

January 23, 2022 · 5 min · Chris Short