Tilt now has plugin extensions

Tilt is a fun, nifty development tool for your development environment for systems with a complex set of microservices.  Watch this 100-second video to get a quick overview.  Tilt recently released an open-source extensions library and is soliciting more extensions.

collecting metrics and monitoring Kafka functionality and performance

If you (or your management) has made the mistake of ignoring the various "Kafka as a service" public cloud offerings by standing up your own Kafka clusters, or, (heaven forfend!) your organization has actually forked Kafka and runs some variation of Kafka, this series of articles from DataDog will be of great interest:  Collecting Kafka Metrics and Monitoring Kafka.

Go vs Rust programming for Kubernetes

Taylor Thomas takes us on a fun comparison of coding in Rust vs coding in Go for Kubernetes tools development.  As a Rust language learner, I can validate the exponentially-difficult learning curve and as a curious Dev-Ops observer, I can also verify the wealth and maturity of GoLang tools and libraries for Kubernetes. 

Autoscaling kubernetes on AWS in batch & interactive workloads

Vlad takes us on an interesting measurement journey into alternatives for minimizing your public cloud computing costs while also maximizing your customers' delight with your low-latency service by auto-scaling your kubernetes services more effectively using Fargate.

He links to this talk by Claire Liguori on interactive workloads.

Among the (very-many) disadvantages of on-premise systems at old stodgy companies is that the sunk costs of hardware and data centers cannot easily be flexibly allocated and "charged back" to the consuming entities within the company.  On the public cloud, if vendor-autoscaling causes some latency or over-provisioning for a few minutes, you can use a serverless solution like Fargate to reduce the waste and customer pain.

90 percent breakdown of PET in under 10 hours

Newly engineered enzyme can break down plastic to raw materials. The resulting chemicals can be used to make brand-new bottles.

Wow! KubeCon was great this year

https://siliconangle.com/2020/04/06/things-kubernetes-else-missed-kubecon-last-week/

Kubecon had some significant announcements.  Six of them are reviewed here for your dev-ops reading pleasure.

Hugo Award nominations 2020

https://locusmag.com/2020/04/2020-hugo-and-astounding-awards-finalists/ 

Seriously, this time:  The 2020 Hugo and Astounding Science Fiction award nominees were announced.  Check them out and add them to your reading list.

 

services mesh survey

Here is another dev-ops overview of the different types of services mesh systems, their designs, strengths, weaknesses and approaches.  A few of the more-popular meshes are missing such as TwistLock.  And my concerns about simplicity and performance are not well-addressed.  But it's a good starting point to learn the basics.  As a beta user of istio, I still recommend it; for example you can have some pods ignore the mesh but log to istio's prometheus to align all events and timestamps.

cloud software component management tags

k9security has a simple set of elements one should include in the tags for resources you deploy in your cloud so that you know whom to charge back (who is spending your public cloud budget?) whom to call when a system fails, etc.  I needed and did not have this list.

Dynamic Development Clusters in Google Cloud Platform

Rob Wilson (Roobert) takes us on a tour of his cluster scaler that enables rapid, dynamic creation, destruction, and scaling of development environments for large development organizations that want to be more efficient with their cloud spend.  Cloud functions and Terraform are used.  Robert's approach is very simple and clever.