Tree-mendous Adventure
AI, AWS, and a chat with Alexis.
This was the week where ChatGPT burst out of nowhere, and everyone immediately asked it what it thought of Kubernetes. The best of these was clearly my own, with apologies to 2002.
For now, I think that Dare Obasanjo has the correct opinion.
AI isn’t without its uses. On my week away, aside from literally driving into the clouds, I took dozens of pictures of New Zealand’s most famous tree, and my iPhone kindly picked out the best one for me. Bereft of an Instagram account1, I share it here with you.
I promise you that ChatGPT didn’t write any of this newsletter. Mostly because I tried pasting in an article and asking for “a summary in the style of a BBC news item” and it crashed out with an error message. I did, however, tell it what I’ve been up to in the last week, and ask it to come up with a title for the newsletter. The pun was so bad that I felt obliged to use it.
Post-invent
After building up Amazon’s conference last week, I read that Amazon managed to present a keynote that Corey Quinn wouldn’t snark about. Having done a little research into why, it seems to have something to do with “new guy is different to old guy; people don’t like keynotes being re:Invented”. That, or as Frederic Lardinois suggests, we have now reached smartphone-level evolutionary, not revolutionary development2.
Oh well; a quick Twitter search says it doesn’t seem they had much to say about Kubernetes3. We move on. Fargate turned 5? I guess that’s news.
A chat with Flux maintainers
CD tools and best friends 4 lyfe, Flux and Argo both reached graduated status in the CNCF in the last week. On such a momentous occasion, Let's Get To The News would like to bring you our first project interview, asking Alexis Richardson, CEO of Weaveworks, some questions on GitOps and Flux. (We’ll bring you some thoughts from the Argo team in an upcoming episode.)
Flux is a set of continuous and progressive delivery solutions for Kubernetes that are open and extensible, enabling GitOps and progressive delivery for developers and infrastructure teams. It was created by Weaveworks in 2017, at around the same time Alexis coined and popularised the term “GitOps”.
Congratulations on “graduating”. Did Flux have to wear a funny hat? How even does software wear hats?
Software is all hats Craig. White Hats, Black Hats, Red Hats and even Green Hats. Flux wears a science hat at parties.
You are the 18th graduated CNCF project. If you were a golf hole, what would your par score be?
Flux is super easy to use and people love it — so par 3. If you want to cheat and make it even easier, you have to use Weave GitOps which is open source and always beats par.
When can we expect the project to be rewritten in Rust?
Flux is already incredibly efficient! Maybe we could ask ChatGPT to do it, but in all seriousness you might want Rust for something like eBPF-Flux for high precision ops involving power metrics and carbon management…
Flux is the original engine for GitOps. The word Git has officially been deemed “unparliamentary language”. Have you had any pushback from the Government Digital Service to the concept of GitOps over the years?
We have not heard a squeak from them since Brexit. Should we be concerned?
We are perpetually 5 years from self-driving cars and one year from the year of Linux on the desktop. How far do you think we are from a working flux capacitor?
Here is a top secret photo that I took of Stefan at Flux Labs! Should be here soon!
News in brief
Brendan Gregg (now of Intel) updates his predictions for computing performance in slides from his SREcon ‘22 talk.
Make sure attackers aren’t using the TokenRequest API to maintain privileged access to a Kubernetes cluster. (Rory McCune/Datadog)
Wikimedia describes their use of GitLab for their release pipeline. (Tyler Cipriani)
Check out a new Kubernetes ingress controller for Tailscale, developed by Michael Wilson of the Allen Institute for AI.
Microsoft and Isovalent have partnered to bring commercial support for Cilium to Azure Kubernetes Service.
Triggermesh announced Shaker, an open source alternative to AWS Eventbridge4.
That’s all we have time for
Missing having me in your ears? Check out my interview with Dan Meyer of SDXcentral on their 7 Layers podcast. Though I’m not sure “from inside the box” is on the list of approved puns5.
And that’s the news.
#ThatWanakaTree
Hold onto that thought, because I intend to say the same about Kubernetes 1.26 next week.
I don’t know that anyone knows how to search Mastodon?
Kindly waiting until after re:Invent to do so.
I tried "thinking outside the box” once: it made my head a splode.