DevOps'ish 229: Kubernetes 1.22, KubeCon schedule announced, security fails abound, Zoom's paltry fine, finally death to 996, NSA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance, and much more

Kubernetes 1.22 shipped this week. I suggest you, at a minimum, read the release blog post or take a gander at the CHANGELOG and definitely read the No, really, you MUST read this before you upgrade. Some of the bigger changes: Audit log files are created with mode 0600 (owner read-only) Rootless mode containers moving to alpha: In my opinion, if you use Podman, you’re used to this. If you’re not, you should be using rootless containers intentionally for security reasons (more on that later). Cgroupsv2 moving to alpha Pod Security Policy replacement (aka Pod Security Admission Controller): Yes, PSPs are deprecated and being replaced. There are a lot of reasons why. LoadBalancer moving to beta Enable seccomp by default and a whole bunch more KubeCon NA 2021 acceptances went out this week and the schedule is live. I’m excited to say I’m teaming up with Kaslin Fields, Bart Farrell, Matthew Broberg, and Kunal Kushwaha for a panel talk about what we’ve been doing in the Kubernetes Upstream Marketing Team (which includes the @K8sContributors Twitter handle and so much more). ...

August 8, 2021 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 228: Natural disasters, GitOps with Codefresh, NSO Group, MeteorExpress, Linkerd, Kubernetes 1.22, TSMC’s 2nm chips, cloud outposts, and more

At 8:13 PM last Saturday, the family and I were gathered in our basement, evading a tornado warning that came through the area. The storm spawned three tornadoes. Luckily, we weren’t hit directly. But we lost power, internet, and cell service. After getting the all-clear and assessing the situation, it was clear that we would be without power for quite a few hours. Making a newsletter last week wasn’t happening. It was technically impossible, and to be honest, I had a big ole stack of higher priorities come in. Then a few hours turned into a few days without these services. Luckily, we have a gas stove and water heater. I spent Monday morning frantically trying to find a place with the trifecta of power, internet, and cell service. It didn’t exist within a twenty-minute radius of our house. We spent over 44 hours without power. We were lucky we didn’t have to wait much longer than that. The roof that I thought was damaged wasn’t (the shingles in our yard weren’t ours 😬😬😬). Cell service came back up in the morning on Tuesday. ...

August 1, 2021 · 7 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 227: So hot right now, Sunk Cost Fallacy, Right to Repair, future of tech events, HelloKitty ransomware now targets VMware ESXi, GitHub Copilot, and more.

I was struck with a very mild case of heat exhaustion a couple of weeks ago after standing over a hot grill hosting our family’s 4th of July party. So when the article “How hot is too hot for the human body?” came across my desk this week, I was uniquely interested in it. I’ve run several miles in the Middle East, the high plains of Colorado, Florida, the jungles of Honduras, and many points in between. “This shouldn’t impact me like it is.” I thought. Why is heat such a deadly factor in cooler climates? Why did I get slammed by this one hot day? I discovered, “While most researchers agree that a wet-bulb temperature of 95 °F is unlivable for most humans, the reality is that less extreme conditions can be deadly too. We’ve only hit those wet-bulb temperatures on Earth a few times, but heat kills people around the world every year.” Oh… “Residents of cooler places are also just less acclimatized to the heat, so wet-bulb temperatures below 95 °F can be deadly.” ...

July 18, 2021 · 8 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 226: Kubernetes non-code contributions, don't ban politics at work, engineers waste 1 day a week on technical debt, CentOS Stream is working out, and more

If you follow me on Twitter you know I’ve had a hard time with stable internet this week. Co-workers asking about my absence, I appreciate you. Sorry, y’all, sometimes everything breaks at once. But then today I get this when working on something newsletter related. Y’all… I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. Then it got worse. I won’t go into details but, let’s just say it was the cherry on top of a shit week for tech but otherwise good week here at home. [] People How to choose a SIG as a non-code Kubernetes contributor “To join the Kubernetes community, I recommend finding a SIG where your skills align, doing things you want to do in your off time. There’s a list of Kubernetes SIGs with a lot of great options. If you’re not sure where to go, start with Contributor Experience. We’re here to help.” LaunchDarkly Named a Leader in Feature Management and Experimentation Discover why in its first Wave report dedicated to Feature Management And Experimentation, Forrester rates LaunchDarkly’s platform a Leader among vendor features that enable development teams to reduce software release headaches and enable true testing in production. Download today! SPONSORED ...

July 11, 2021 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 225: AWS Infinidash, GPT-3 via GitHub Copilot, Polywork, rainbow marketing, LinkedIn breach, VMs hiding ransomware, Kubernetes overspend, Helm, GitOps, Tailscale with Kubernetes, and more

“AWS Infinidash is a new networking technology that is being introduced to the AWS cloud. This technology is being used by AWS to provide a new networking model that is more efficient and more scalable than the current networking model.” —GPT-3 GPT-3 generated that statement about AWS Infinidash thanks to GitHub Copilot. I’m also using GitHub Codespaces through VSCode and the web to write this week’s newsletter. I’ll probably have a write-up on these new tools in the near future. Thank you, GitHub, for access to these tools early. But, back to the point: AWS Infinidash. It’s not real! It’s complete hogwash, and you shouldn’t feel bad if you didn’t know that. The fake AWS Infinidash service highlights the veracity of a joke gone wrong on an industry scale as it has (there’s a Rust library for it). AWS was the innocent victim of the prank, too. But, instead, it’s humans that are taking the blowback. People are dunking on other people on Twitter for not being “in” on the joke. Recruiters are getting shamed for asking for five years experience in a technology that doesn’t exist. But, according to GPT-3, it does. If they were using GPT-3, they’d be reinforced in this thinking. ...

July 4, 2021 · 10 min · Chris Short