testing network code in a CI framework

If you have ever seen any of the Cloudflare talks about how Cloudflare hacked nginx and saved the Internet, you will have some idea of how difficult and complicated edge security policy really is.  Anomalies are legion and enormous.  The "bad actors" are brilliant, talented, persistent, and have huge resources available for attack.  How can the rest of us hope to defend ourselves and keep complicated network security policies from causing major outage or failing their primary purpose of defense?

Here, with step-by-step examples and demonstrations is one approach, using Calico.  However, the examples are simple and straightforward.  The real world is much-more complex.

early insights into our serverless and no-ops future

O'Reilly's serverless survey is not very very scientific.  And all respondents are self-selected serverless enthusiasts.  But there are some good cautionary data about what is not working well.

DevSecOps analysis by Guy Podjarny

Guy writes an interesting analysis about how security concerns that were formerly specialized within a security team as companies like eBay have are getting pushed into the Developer function as modern cloud-native companies are organizing.

Monday starts on Saturday by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

I enjoyed this one for many reasons.  It is a real "slice of life" of Soviet era Leningrad and therefore immersive.  It has great aphorisms and clever fantasy.  But all of the humor and most of the whimsey is lost on me.  3/5 stars.

Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole

Still ok, but I am starting not to like this series as it gets further into telekinesis, bad physics, and terrible "AI" robotics.  Good story, characters, close-combat. 3/5 stars.

Platforms and Developers' "Cognitive Load"

Many "platform" teams should read and think about the concepts behind this dev-ops talk about Kubernetes and the complexity of foundational components that are not true platforms. It's a good talk and an interesting example.

Bazel, github shell action, and immutable infrastructure

Filip Nikolovski writes up how he tuned the performance of his Bazel continuous integration (CI) pipeline.  It's interesting that the newest and best containerized systems still fall into terribly inefficient execution patterns unless we manually tune them.

What do our "isolation" attempts do to the spread of COVID-19?

As I speculated from the variables in the equation, isolation prolongs the pandemic by several weeks -- it slows the spread but does not stop it.  We hope it drastically decreases the amplitude, assuming isolation continues for several weeks.

Also in the 2020-03-10 COVID-19 update on ArsTech:  

"public health experts were critical of the moves, calling some of them draconian and ineffective. For instance, quarantines, which can clumsily round up the sick with the healthy, may not prevent the spread of disease—which we certainly saw on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, quarantined in Japan. And travel restrictions in our highly-connected world are inevitably leaky."

". . .a new non-peer-reviewed, unpublished study, an international team of researchers estimated that without the measures, the number of cases in mainland China would have been 67-times higher. And if officials had begun implementing them just one week earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent. If they had implemented them three weeks earlier, cases would have been reduced by 95 percent.

". . . in a Twitter thread March 10, one of the coauthors of that study, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, noted that as community spread increases, social distancing—however painful—becomes essential to slowing and minimizing the impact."

Brennendes Geheimnis von Stefan Zweig

Ich habe diesen Roman wirklich genossen. Die Geschichte ist einfach, aber die Psychologie ist zeitlos. 5/5 Sterne.

Great North Road by Peter F Hamilton

Really fantastic story and great "space opera" awe, wonder, 5/5 stars.