All articles tagged #experience

Saim Safdar from the Cloud Native Islamabad community generously invited me to his channel to conduct a Kubernetes 101 workshop. However, as often happens, I found myself pulled in a slightly different direction:

What if you don't start with Pods, Deployments, and Services and instead take a step back and look at how things were done in the past with good old VMs? Can it help you understand Kubernetes faster and deeper?

Below, I present a more polished version of the workshop, enriched with illustrations and runnable examples. You can experiment with these examples directly in your browser on labs.iximiuz.com.

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Today, I came across a true gem: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design. Originally written for the aerospace engineering domain. I find many parts of it relevant for software engineers as well. Below, I share my thoughts on the Laws that resonate most with my experience as a software designer and tech blogger.

As it often happens, I discovered it through Matt Rickard's newsletter.

What DALL-E thinks the image for this blog post should look like.

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This is a long overdue post on iximiuz Labs' internal kitchen. It'll cover why I decided to build my own learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineers, how I designed it, what technology stack chose, and how various components of the platform were implemented. It'll also touch on some of the trade-offs that I had to make along the way and highlight the most interesting parts of the platform's architecture. In the end, I'll, of course, share my thoughts on what's next on the roadmap. Sounds interesting? Then brace for a long read!

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Many of us these days seem to be in pursuit of better container images. And this is for good reasons! Bloated images with many (potentially unneeded) moving parts slow down development and give more space for a CVE to sneak in. Luckily, there is a number of ways to produce slim and secure images, and everyone just needs to pick their poison a suitable one. But before doing so, it's good to become aware of a potential dissonance between what we say is important for us (securing our software supply chains) and what may actually drive our decisions (keeping out dev loops fast).

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There are lots of posts trying to show how simple it is to get started with Kubernetes. But many of these posts use complicated Kubernetes jargon for that, so even those with some prior server-side knowledge might be bewildered. Let me try something different here. Instead of explaining one unfamiliar matter (how to run a web service in Kubernetes?) with another (you just need a manifest, with three sidecars and a bunch of gobbledygook), I'll try to reveal how Kubernetes is actually a natural development of the good old deployment techniques.

If you already know how to run services using virtual machines, hopefully, you'll see that there's not much of a difference in the end. And if you're totally new to operating services at scale, following through the evolution of the technology might help you as well with the understanding of contemporary approaches.

As usual, this article is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather it's an attempt to summarize my personal experience and how my understanding of the domain has been forming over the years.

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