Mediocre follow-up
You have your whole life to write your first newsletter
The working title for the second Crowded House record was “Mediocre Follow-Up”. It is often described using the words “darker” and “fan favourite”. Last week’s inaugural issue of Let’s Get To The News was described using the words “solid signal to noise ratio” and “sassy”. There was, shall we say, a lot to talk about.
(Enjoy a moody 1988 soundtrack while reading this episode.)
Blah blah cache invalidation naming things: I decided pretty quickly that the “Let’s get to the…” shtick wasn’t going to last12. So, please enjoy this week’s mediocre follow-up, and feel free to suggest both articles and titles for future issues on Twitter, assuming it still exists at time of reading.
New and notable
Perhaps the cloud was all just a fad? DuckDB is an analytics database designed to run locally: think SQLite for analytics, using columnar storage. New startup Motherduck has just launched to provide DuckDB using descriptors like “enterprise” and “serverless”, with $47.5m raised across seed and series A rounds. Founded by the co-creator of BigQuery and a team3 from various analytics companies, Motherduck suggests your last-generation 10-core laptop has more processing power available to you than the time-slice of a data warehouse you’re paying for at the moment.
Istio 1.16 is out: headline features include the implementation of the HBONE tunnelling mode that powers Ambient Mesh and the Maglev load balancer that powers Google. Gateway API support is moving to Beta, with Istio documentation now including both classic Istio and Gateway API examples.
Google also gave their GKE Gateway controller the GA guarantee; best hope upstream doesn’t change the implementation!
If you use GitHub Actions, you’ll know your options for runners, the machines that do the work, are “GitHub-provided VMs” or “host your own”. There’s community dissatisfaction at the lack of something better: there’s no support for ARM64, for example; you have to use QEMU to emulate it4.
Friend of the newsletter Alex Ellis has patched the gap with Actuated, a project where you provide the hosts and Alex provides the rest. Firecracker VMs are spun up and connected to GitHub by the Actuated tooling. 33 minutes down to 1:26 isn’t bad.
Speaking of GitHub, they held their GitHub Universe conference last week: a key announcement is that open source maintainers can now receive private vulnerability reports, remediate them, and issue a CVE all from GitHub. Check out the other announcements from their event.
Another vendor event last week was VMware Explore Europe, with a bunch of Kubernetes-related announcements before and during:
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 adds support for Oracle Cloud, but you’re still strangely out of luck if you want to run on Google.
You can now run Mission Control in your own environment.
VMware has added support for multi-cluster, multi-cloud service mesh and VM expansion to the Tanzu Service Mesh.
The Application Service Adapter brings commercial support for the Cloud Foundry “cf push” experience (based on Korifi).
One thing that you won’t see is Tanzu’s Community Edition; that has been quietly retired in favour of up to 100 free cores on TKG5.
If I asked you to imagine who might not be prominent contributors to open communities and you might settle quickly on the institutionally-secretive defence industry. In a keynote at the Linux Foundation Members Summit and Lake Tahoe Getaway, Boeing discussed the foundation of their Open Source Programs Office in 2022. The talk also included the announcement that effective immediately, Boeing staff are allowed to contribute to CNCF incubating and graduated projects.
Blue check yourself before you wreck yourself
So, the important question of the week: does this newsletter cover Twitter? Reading Twitter, it seems it’s all we’re all thinking about and talking about as an industry. Some weeks, there’s a fine line between “researching your newsletter” and “doom scrolling”. Thankfully I’m not an opinion columnist6.
The Twitter story crossed over from “industry” to “Kubernetes user” news this week. At the time of writing, the effects of laying off 80% of the platform engineers have started to manifest in the supposed failure of a number of Twitter’s microservices. The effects have been visible in terms ranging from graceful degradation to things not working. Thankfully Elon only needs 20% of them.
Suggested reading on the topic includes Platformer and Gergely Orosz7. Friends inside Twitter, who Lets Get To The News knows the identity of but is choosing not to disclose, declined to comment for this issue.
Not gonna touch crypto though. That shit is bad for humanity.8
Short takes
Cloudflare launched the Supercloud; Not to be outdone Cosmonic launched super constellations. The next logical step is clearly Oort cloud computing.
If you’re running “Istio on GKE”, which used to be a check-box in a GKE cluster, then you will be migrated to “Anthos Service Mesh”, Google’s managed mesh product, in the near future. This might be a good thing for you, but it will cost you a lot more than the “free” it used to be. Google Cloud has published a FAQ; to continue at “free” you will have to move yourself to self-managed, open-source Istio.
Docker Desktop 4.14 introduces a resource usage view: an image detail view for vulnerabilities will be rolling out soon.
A critical CVE in Grafana: patched in the 8.x and 9.x series. Did the Cloud Native community stay on the 7.x series, the last to remain Apache licensed? (Kubescape has added a control to detect vulnerable versions.)
Learn how to use the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler with a great configuration guide published by Segment, a division of Twilio.
The CNCF launched a free introductory course to Backstage, the developer portal toolbox contributed by Spotify and covered on Episode 136 of the old show.
AV club
Appeared this week: Check me out on Techstrong TV talking about my new role.
Watched this week: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. The promotion of this film included this timely tweet from Al, which caught a lot of people who didn’t know that Daniel Radcliffe was never on Twitter.
Finally, a number of people have suggested that this content might be a good basis for a podcast. My standard reply is “I’ll perform a dramatic reading when I hit 500 subscribers”. If that thought bothers you, if we hit 1,000, I’ll make Adam do it instead.
And that’s the news.
Follow me on Twitter while you still can.
Oh, but the footnotes certainly are.
Do you remember that Family Guy was initially all titled about death and murder? That lasted four episodes.
“Google“ : “Googler” :: “Motherduck” : 🤔
I assume that is not as fast as using my new M1 Mac to emulate x86.
Congratulations also to Navneet Joneja, who has graduated from VMware and taken a new role at Netlify.
Stop trying to be one, Craig!
Rhymes with “Sergei”. You have to research this kind of thing when you’re a podcast host.
I didn’t know what an SBF or an FTX was before this week.