Welcome to Technology Short Take #113! I hope the collection of links and articles I’ve gathered for you contains something useful for you. I think I have a pretty balanced collection this time around; there’s a little bit of something for almost everyone. Who says you can’t please everyone all the time?
kube-iptables-tailer
, which turns packet drops from iptables
into Kubernetes events that can be logged for easier troubleshooting. The GitHub repository for the project is here.Welcome to Technology Short Take #112! It’s been quite a while since the last one, as life and work have been keeping me busy. I have, however, finally managed to pull together this list of links and articles from around the Internet, and I hope that something I’ve included here proves useful to readers.
Nothing this time around! I’ll stay alert for content I can include next time.
kube-psp-advisor
, a tool to help simplify deploying PSPs.In my recent post on using kubeadm
to set up a Kubernetes 1.13 cluster with AWS integration, I mentioned that I was still working out the details on enabling AWS integration (via the AWS cloud provider) while also using new functionality in kubeadm
(specifically, the --experimental-control-plane
flag) to make it easier to join new control plane nodes to the cluster. In this post, I’ll share with you what I’ve found to make this work.
The challenge here, by the way, is that you can’t use the --config <filename>.yaml
flag and the --experimental-control-plane
flag at the same time. I did try this, and the results of my testing led me to believe that although kubeadm
doesn’t report an error, it does ignore the --experimental-control-plane
flag. (Kubernetes experts/contributors, feel free to let me know if I’ve missed something here.)
After some trial-and-error—mostly my own fault because I didn’t take the time to review the v1beta1 kubeadm
API docs ahead of time—I finally arrived at a working configuration that allows you to use kubeadm join --config <filename>.yaml
to join a control plane node to an existing AWS-integrated Kubernetes cluster.
Credit for finding the solution goes to Rafael Fernández López, Continue reading
I’m thankful to have the opportunity to work with an amazing team. Many of my teammates also produce some very useful content via their own sites, and so I thought it might be useful to my readers to share a list of links to my teammates’ blogs.
Without further ado, here is a list of my teammates who have a blog; each entry is a link to the respective site (these are presented in no particular order):
I know I’ve gained valuable insight from some of their content, and I hope you do as well.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m a huge supporter of Spousetivities, and not just because it was my wife, Crystal Lowe, who launched this movement. What started as the gathering of a few folks at VMworld 2008 has grown over the last 11 years, and this year marks the appearance of Spousetivities at an entirely new conference: Oktane 2019!
Oktane is the conference for Okta, a well-known provider of identity services, and the event is happening in San Francisco from April 1 through April 4 (at Moscone West). This year, Okta is bringing Spousetivities in to add activities for those traveling to San Francisco with conference attendees.
What sort of activities are planned? The Oktane19 Spousetivities landing page has full details, but here’s a quick peek:
…and more!
If you’re attending Oktane19 and are bringing along a spouse, domestic partner, family member, or even just a friend—I’d definitely recommend signing them up for Spousetivities. Continue reading
It’s been a little while now since I published my 2018 project report card, which assessed my progress against my 2018 project goals. I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to the areas where I’d like to focus my professional (technical) development this coming year, and I think I’ve come up with some project goals that align both with where I am professionally right now and where I want to be technically as I grow and evolve. This is a really difficult balance to strike, and we’ll see at the end of the year how well I did.
Without further ado, here’s my list of 2019 project goals, along with an optional stretch goal (where it makes sense).
Make at least one code contribution to an open source project. For the last few years, I’ve listed various programming- and development-related project goals. In all such cases, I haven’t done well with those goals because they were too vague, and—as I pointed out in previous project report cards—these less-than-ideal results are probably due to the way programming skills tend to be learned (by solving a problem/challenge instead of just learning language semantics and syntax). So, in an effort to Continue reading
vpnc
is a fairly well-known VPN connectivity package available for most Linux distributions. Although the vpnc
web site describes it as a client for the Cisco VPN Concentrator, it works with a wide variety of IPSec VPN solutions. I’m using it to connect to a Palo Alto Networks-based solution, for example. In this post, I’d like to share how to set up split tunneling for vpnc
.
Split tunneling, as explained in this Wikipedia article, allows remote users to access corporate resources over the VPN while still accessing non-corporate resources directly (as opposed to having all traffic routed across the VPN connection). Among other things, split tunneling allows users to access things on their home LAN—like printers—while still having access to corporate resources. For users who work 100% remotely, this can make daily operations much easier.
vpnc
does support split tunneling, but setting it up doesn’t seem to be very well documented. I’m publishing this post in an effort to help spread infomation on how it can be done.
First, go ahead and create a configuration file for vpnc
. For example, here’s a fictional configuration file:
IPSec gateway vpn.company.com
IPSec ID VPNGroup
IPSec secret donttellanyone
Xauth username bobsmith
I recently had a need to do some “advanced” filtering of AMIs returned by the AWS CLI. I’d already mastered the use of the --filters
parameter, which let me greatly reduce the number of AMIs returned by aws ec2 describe-images
. In many cases, using filters alone got me what I needed. In one case, however, I needed to be even more selective in returning results, and this lead me to some (slightly more) complex JMESPath queries than I’d used before. I wanted to share them here for the benefit of my readers.
What I’d been using before was a command that looked something like this:
ec2 describe-images --owners 099720109477 \
--filters Name=name,Values="*ubuntu-xenial-16.04*" \
Name=virtualization-type,Values=hvm \
Name=root-device-type,Values=ebs \
Name=architecture,Values=x86_64 \
--query 'sort_by(Images,&CreationDate)[-1].ImageId'
The part after --query
is a JMESPath query that sorts the results, returning only the ImageId
attribute of the most recent result (sorted by creation date). In this particular case, this works just fine—it returns the most recent Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS AMI.
Turning to Ubuntu Bionic 18.04, though, I found that the same query didn’t return the result I needed. In addition to the regular builds of 18.04, Canonical apparently also builds EKS Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #111! I’m a couple weeks late on this one; wanted to publish it earlier but work has been keeping me busy (lots and lots of interest in Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies out there!). In any event, here you are—I hope you find something useful for you!
network-engine
command parser back in Technology Short Take 102 (July of last year). I’m not sure how I missed that part 2 was published only 2 days later, so I’m rectifying that now. Go check out part 2.A few days ago I was talking with a few folks on Twitter and the topic of using VPNs while traveling came up. For those that travel regularly, using a VPN to bypass traffic restrictions is not uncommon. Prompted by my former manager Martin Casado, I thought I might share a few thoughts on VPN options for road warriors. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but hopefully something I share here will be helpful.
There were a few things I wanted to share with readers:
Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed quite a few questions appearing in the Kubernetes Slack channels about how to use kubeadm
to configure Kubernetes with the AWS cloud provider. You may recall that I wrote a post about setting up Kubernetes with the AWS cloud provider last September, and that post included a few snippets of YAML for kubeadm
config files. Since I wrote that post, the kubeadm
API has gone from v1alpha2 (Kubernetes 1.11) to v1alpha3 (Kubernetes 1.12) and now v1beta1 (Kubernetes 1.13). The changes in the kubeadm
API result in changes in the configuration files, and so I wanted to write this post to explain how to use kubeadm
1.13 to set up a Kubernetes cluster with the AWS cloud provider.
I’d recommend reading the previous post from last September first. In that post, I listed four key configuration items that are necessary to make the AWS cloud provider work:
On a recent customer project, I recommended the use of Heptio Contour for ingress on their Kubernetes cluster. For this particular customer, Contour’s support of the IngressRoute CRD and the ability to delegate paths via IngressRoutes made a lot of sense. Of course, the customer wanted to be able to scrape metrics using Prometheus, which meant I not only needed to scrape metrics from Contour but also from Envoy (which provides the data plane for Contour). In this post, I’ll show you how to scrape metrics from Envoy using the Prometheus Operator.
First, I’ll assume that you’ve already installed and configured Prometheus using the Prometheus Operator, a task which is already fairly well-documented and well-understood. If this is something you think would be helpful for me to write a blog post on, please contact me on Twitter and let me know.
The overall process looks something like this:
Welcome to Technology Short Take #110! Here’s a look at a few of the articles and posts that have caught my attention over the last few weeks. I hope something I’ve included here is useful for you also!
Welcome to Technology Short Take #109! This is the first Technology Short Take of 2019. It may be confirmation bias, but I’ve noticed of number of sites adding “Short Take”-type posts to their content lineup. I’ll take that as flattery, even if it wasn’t necessary intended that way. Enjoy!
Nothing this time around, but I’ll stay alert for items to include next time.
I just finished reading Cindy Sridharan’s excellent post titled “Effective Mental Models for Code and Systems,” and some of the points Sridharan makes immediately jumped out to me—not for “traditional” code development, but for the development of infrastructure as code. Take a few minutes to go read the post—seriously, it’s really good. Done reading it? Good, now we can proceed.
Some of these thoughts I was going to share in a planned presentation at Interop ITX in May 2019, but since I’m unable to speak at the conference this year due to schedule conflicts (my son’s graduation from college and a major anniversary trip for me and Crystal), I figured now was as good a time as any, especially given the timing of Sridharan’s post. Also, a lot of these thoughts stem from a discussion with a colleague at work, which in turn led to this Full Stack Journey podcast on practical infrastructure as code.
Anyway, let me get back to Sridharan’s post. One of the things that jumped out to me right away was Sridharan’s proposed hierarchy of needs for code:
As you can see in the image (full credit for which belongs to Sridharan, as far Continue reading
In December 2016, I kicked off a migration from macOS to Linux as my primary laptop OS. Throughout 2017, I chronicled my progress and challenges along the way; links to all those posts are found here. Although I stopped the migration in August 2017, I restarted it in April 2018 when I left VMware to join Heptio. In this post, I’d like to recap where things stand as of December 2018, after 8 months of full-time use of Linux as my primary laptop OS.
I’ll structure this post roughly as a blend of the formats I used in my April 2017 and July 2017 progress reports.
Readers may recall that I was using a Dell Latitude E7370 (see my E7370 hardware review) up until August 2017, when I put the Linux migration on hold indefinitely due to productivity concerns. Upon moving to Heptio, I switched to a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (see here for my review of the X1 Carbon—the “TL;DR” is that I love it). In my home office, the X1 Carbon connects to a USB-C expansion hub that provides connectivity to a 34” 21:9 ultrawide curved monitor, external HD webcam, and a USB headset for Zoom Continue reading
Over the last five years or so, I’ve shared with my readers an annual list of projects along with—at the year’s end—a “project report card” on how I fared against the projects I’d set for myself. (For example, here’s my project report card for 2017.) Following that same pattern, then, here is my project report card for 2018.
Here’s the list of projects I established for myself in 2018 (you can also read the associated blog post for more context):
So, how did I do? Let’s take a look.
Become extremely fluent in Kubernetes: This is, in my opinion, a hard one to accurately gauge. Why? Well, Kubernetes is a pretty massive project. I saw a tweet recently saying the project was now at a point where no one person can understand all of it. The other factor making it difficult for me to accurately gauge this is the caliber Continue reading
In early 2017 I kicked off an effort to start using Linux as my primary desktop OS, and I blogged about the journey. That particular effort ended in late October 2017. I restarted the migration in April 2018 (when I left VMware to join Heptio), and since that time I’ve been using Linux (Fedora, specifically) full-time. However, I thought it might be helpful to collect the articles I wrote about the experience together for easy reference. Without further ado, here they are.
Other Users’ Stories: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Corporate Collaboration: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
These are only the articles directly related to the migration efforts, but many more articles were spawned as a result of the project. Browse through all the Fedora-tagged articles to see some related articles.
If you have any questions about migrating to Linux or about any of these articles (or related articles), you’re welcome to contact me on Twitter. I look forward to hearing from you!
Welcome to Technology Short Take #108! This will be the last Technology Short Take of 2018, so here’s hoping I can provide something useful for you. Enjoy!
I’ve been working on migrating off macOS for a couple of years (10+ years on a single OS isn’t undone quickly or easily). I won’t go into all the gory details here; see this post for some background and then see this update from last October that summarized my previous efforts to migrate to Linux (Fedora, specifically) as my primary desktop operating system. (What I haven’t blogged about is the success I had switching to Fedora full-time when I joined Heptio.) I took another big step forward in my efforts this past week, when I rebuilt my 2011-era Mac Pro workstation to run Fedora.
When I mentioned this on Twitter, a few people asked the question every parent dreads hearing: “Why?” (If you’ve been a parent for more than a couple years you’ll understand this.) The motivation for using Linux is something I’ve already discussed. As for the hardware, it’s simple: the hardware for the Mac Pro is very good (see the base specs here), so why not re-use the hardware for use with Linux? I mean, if I’ve already decided on running Linux (which I have), then why spend money on new hardware Continue reading