Technology Short Take 87
Published on 22 Sep 2017 · Filed in Information · 871 words (estimated 5 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #87! I have a mix of newer and older items for you this time around. While I’m a bit short on links in some areas, hopefully this is outweighed by some good content in other areas. Here’s hoping you find something useful!
Networking
- Vincent Bernat has a really in-depth article on IPv4 route lookup on Linux (and one on IPv6 route lookup as well).
- Ivan Pepelnjak has a great article that tries to get to the kernel of truth in the middle of the intent-based networking hype.
- Jason Edelman of Network2Code also has a post on intent-based network automation with Ansible, in which he breaks down the idea of intent-based networking (IBN) and how tools such as Ansible or NAPALM can make it possible.
- From the Department of “Sitting in my Inbox for Way Too Long”, I wanted to point out a company that I ran into back in May of this year at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. The company is VirTool Networks (catchy, eh?), and their product (VirTool Network Analyzer) is aimed at providing some operational visibility into OpenStack virtual networks. I saw a demo of the product—it looks quite handy, and provides a pretty fair amount of information to help operators figure out what’s happening “under the covers.” If your shop is into OpenStack, you might want to give this tool a look.
- Ajay Chenampara (also with Network2Code) has a good post on lessons learned from interacting with NETCONF and YANG (key lesson: there’s two ways to use NETCONF, and one of them doesn’t involve YANG).
Servers/Hardware
Nothing this time around, but stay tuned for something next time.
Security
- Chris Binnie walks you through the process of using user namespaces to help secure your Docker hosts and containers.
- Joep Piscaer discusses his use of ProtonVPN as an always-on VPN for his home network.
- Sadequl Hussain has an introduction to basic concepts in SELinux that may be worth reading if you’re unfamiliar with SELinux (as it seems many people are).
- Virtue Security has some articles on AWS penetration testing: one on S3 buckets and one that also covers IAM and EC2.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Alexander Holbreich has a write-up on how to install Kubernetes on Ubuntu.
- Corey Quinn dives into some of the “secret sauce” behind Amazon Route 53; specifically, health checks and traffic policies.
- Ádám Sándor has launched a blog series (chapter 1 is available now) that mirrors Kelsey Hightower’s Kubernetes the Hard Way tutorial on GitHub. I’m looking forward to future chapters in this series.
- The folks over at Cloudify recently did a survey on the state of “enterprise multi-cloud”; the report is available here (doesn’t appear to be behind a paywall/regwall). A few interesting things jumped out at me from the report; one of them was regarding an increase in “siloism” as organizations embraced multiple clouds. Anyway, you may find the report interesting.
- AWS goes to per-second billing for EC2 instances and EBS volumes.
- Massimo Re Ferre has a great article discussing VMware Cloud on AWS versus Azure Stack and breaking down the differences between the two approaches.
Operating Systems/Applications
- RIP Solaris.
- Chris Collins takes a deeper look at Buildah, a tool for building container images (including Docker-compatible container images).
- Dusty Mabe has a multi-part blog series on Atomic Host. The series starts with part 0 (preparation), and continues with part 1 (mostly about
rpm-ostree), part 2 (container storage), part 3 (rebase, upgrade, and rollback), part 4 (package layering and experimental features), and part 5 (containerized and non-containerized applications). There’s a ton of information in this series! - Ryan Lane provides a fairly in-depth overview of why Lyft uses SaltStack for AWS orchestration instead of Terraform. Lane makes some great points, but I think it’s also really important to highlight that this decision also comes with the burden of maintaining custom Python state modules and other code. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s just something to consider if you or your organization is considering a similar choice.
- Andrew Montalenti discusses the state of Linux on the desktop by examining his own journey with various Lenovo-branded laptops.
- I recently used a variation of the information in this article to keep OTR private keys in sync among a group of OS X-based systems.
Storage
- I wouldn’t normally include this sort of link, but I know that I personally have benefited from J Metz’ storage knowledge so this seems like a reasonable way of returning the favor (he was a huge help me to “back in the day” when I was writing FCoE posts). J has launched a Patreon page to help drive funding to enable him to create new storage-related content. If storage is your thing, have a look and see if this is something that makes sense for you.
Virtualization
- John Kozej walks through how to configure vCenter HA using the NSX load balancer.
- Ivan Pepelnjak speaks frankly about VMware Cloud on AWS. (And don’t you just love the new design on his site?)
Career/Soft Skills
- Julia Evans has a good post on how to answer questions well.
Alright, it’s time to wrap up now. I hope you’ve found something useful, and look for the next Technology Short Take in about 2 weeks.