CatOps

2022-01-09 17:52:55 ​​Yesterday I shared this video in our chat and it looks like people liked it. So, I would like to share it here with the broader audience.

In this video Victor Farcic speaks about AWS Karpenter and its advantages comparing to good old cluster-autoscaler.

A few notable things:
- Karpenter is workload-aware. It means that it can determine, how many resources does your workload needs and scale up a cluster accordingly. So, if you need to place just a tiny pod, you’ll get a smaller node comparing to a situation if you need to run a few heavy tasks
- Karpenter is topology-aware. So, for example, you can schedule nodes for a given workload in a specific AZ only. It’s neat if you use EBS volumes or additional network interfaces
- It’s groupless, meaning that it doesn’t have a concept of “instance groups” like cluster-autoscaler (and many other autoscalers). So, cluster-autoscaler modifies parameters of instance group, Karpenter on another hand talks to AWS APIs directly. In theory, this should reduce scale-up and scale-down times

#kubernetes #aws Открыть/Комментировать

2022-01-08 13:25:44 Once everybody patched their Log4j dependencies and went back from holidays, it's time to process, what just happened.

In his article Professional Maintainers: a Wake-up Call Filippo Valsorda argues that the current open-source model is unsustainable. Thus, the only viable alternative to solve this status-quo, in his onion, is for open-source maintainers to start issuing invoices to companies that require support or new features.

I know that such maintainers already exist, but this is definitely not a common practice.

Anyways, there are so many non-sustainable things in this world and our usual way of solving them is to pretend that they don't exist. So, let this article be just an invitation to think about the current state of affairs.

P.S. If you're a maintainer or a contributor to an open-source project, you're doing a god's work! Thank you!

#open_source #culture Открыть/Комментировать

2022-01-07 11:00:18 New Year resolutions is a very common practice. I do mine as well, but this time I want to share a review of databases in 2021 with Dr. Andy Pavlo.

Some points from the article:

- RDBMS is an old concept, but it dominates the market even for greenfield projects and it‘s here to stay
- PostgreSQL gains more and more popularity. It might be not the most popular database, but it steadily moving to the top
- “…only old people care about official TPC numbers.”
- More and more money is invested into DB-related startups. Size of each funding series has also increased comparing to previous big takes. ”We are in the golden era of databases. There are so many excellent choices available today. Investors are searching for database start-ups that can become the next Snowflake-like IPO.”
- People have moved away from MapReduce and Hadoop technologies nowadays.
- Larry Ellison - a co-founder of Oracle - is back to the 5th position of the richest persons list

#databases Открыть/Комментировать

2022-01-06 12:38:58 From our subscribers.

People can use AWS Elastic Container Registry to cache public Docker images.

From their press-release:

This new capability gives AWS customers a simple and highly available way to pull Docker Official Images, while taking advantage of the generous AWS Free Tier. Customers pulling images from Amazon ECR Public to any AWS Region get virtually unlimited downloads. For workloads running outside of AWS, users not authenticated on AWS receive 500 GB of data downloads each month. For additional data downloads, they can sign up or sign in to an AWS account to get up to 5TB of data downloads each month after which they pay $0.09 per GB.

If you have any interesting things to share, you can always do it in our chat!

#aws Открыть/Комментировать

2021-12-28 13:36:26 I re-designed my blog not just for the sake of re-designing. At least, I hope so.

So, here is a new article from a wannabe series about Kubernetes.

This series started with a review of Velero backup tool. Now, I want to extend this topic a bit and share my thoughts on whether it makes sense to back up a Kubernetes cluster at all.


P.S. This is the last technical article in my blog this year. I usually do a generic recap of the year, but haven't done one yet. Also, this is the last post in CatOps channel this year.

Wish y'all reliability during the festive season and only five nines in the new year!

#kubernetes #backup #blog Открыть/Комментировать

2021-12-27 12:54:26 AWS launches its own version of StackOverflow - AWS re:Post.

It's meant to be a community-driven Q&A service. Although, there are already questions there. Some of them even have answers.

Well, let's wish good luck to AWS. TBH, it would be nice to have some sort of Q&A service with official answers from AWS developers.

#aws Открыть/Комментировать

2021-12-22 13:57:54 ​​Yet another post from the #app_bundle series. This is again a video from Viktor Farcic on how to combine ArgoCD, Crossplane, and KubeVela to completely abstract Kubernetes away from your product engineers aka developers and (allegedly) make their lives easier.

In the end of each year, many people make predictions on what upcoming times would look like. And I can say that abstracting clusters away will be a big thing in the industry. This brings us to the logical question: "So, why do all this stuff and not just use serverless options out of the box?". I will let you answer this question on your own.

P.S. You can save this post to blame me later, if this prediction happens to be wrong.

#kubernetes #cicd Открыть/Комментировать

2021-12-18 20:29:33 ​​Apache Issues 3rd Patch to Fix New High-Severity Log4j Vulnerability

Tracked as CVE-2021-45105 (CVSS score: 7.5), the new vulnerability affects all versions of the tool from 2.0-beta9 to 2.16.0, which the open-source nonprofit shipped earlier this week to remediate a second flaw that could result in remote code execution (CVE-2021-45046), which, in turn, stemmed from an "incomplete" fix for CVE-2021-44228, otherwise called the Log4Shell vulnerability.

#security Открыть/Комментировать

2021-12-18 16:12:55 Holiday Book Recommendations by Gergely Orosz - an author of The Pragmatic Engineer blog.

A bit unfortunate for me that this article was published on 17th of December, while I have already bought some engineering books before the end of the year (we have a special budget for that in my company). However, 4 out 5 books I’ve bought are in this list :)
The only exception is Database Internals, but I guess this book is just too specific for a generic IT book recommendation.

So, I hope you can find something interesting for you in this list! There are multiple categories there, from engineering management to technology-specific topics. Also, “The Pragmatic Engineer” is a really cool blog about IT in general as well as some European specifics. I read it myself and can totally recommend it!

Happy upcoming holidays!

#books Открыть/Комментировать

2021-12-16 13:54:15 Log4Shell exploit for the popular Log4j library has impacted a lot of Java services all over the globe including the popular Elastic stack.

Here is what you need to know about Log4j and ElasticSearch

#security #elasticsearch Открыть/Комментировать