Chris Short

I found a topic that I’m going to suggest for an Open Space at every DevOpsDays I go to from this point forward: “Container Conundrum: Pain points around containers” These notes are presented here without opinion. Distilling these notes into a concise narrative will be the topic for an introduction to an upcoming DevOps’ish newsletter. Please subscribe today! I think the best way to look at these notes is to assume that each bullet point is a pain point....

I’m not going to lie. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a helpful technology. It’s supposed to have made getting a Linux environment on Windows easier. However, having just tried getting it up and running on the lone Windows box I own, I can confirm it’s a pain to install unless you’re a Windows system administrator or know what you’re doing. The hype for WSL2 appears to have overlooked the user experience....

This introduction to eBPF is adapted from the beginning of DevOps’ish 278 I occasionally ask for writing prompts from folks on Twitter for DevOps’ish. Sometimes asking on social media works well. Other times it’s giving someone a good URL and still scratching my head about what to write. But for DevOps’ish 278, the people have spoken. They want to learn more about eBPF. What is eBPF? eBPF (which is no longer an acronym for anything) is a revolutionary technology with origins in the Linux kernel that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel....

I opened someone’s Twitter profile in April and saw a Linktree URL. I click it and start to poke around after signing up for an account. The changing gradient backgrounds amuse me. I appreciate the mobile-friendliness and the built-in analytics. I needed something like this to help me add newsletter subscribers, guide folks to my various projects, and all the other things Linktree does. I have a lot of sites and social profiles....

I think I’ve discovered my development environment equivalent to nirvana. code-server fronted by Caddy on a box with Tailscale installed. I maintain a lot of Hugo websites. Hugo has been my go-to content management system (CMS) since discovering it in 2017 (I got my first Hugo site at GopherCon 2017). I’ve lost count of the number of domains I own (a common nerd problem). But, I know I have a handful of websites I update regularly....

Pulled directly from the introduction of DevOps’ish 272 Conway’s Law and GitOps are two things that go hand in hand. I’d like that not to be the case, but in building and working with an upcoming demo of multi-cluster GitOps, I’m worried GitOps might not reach an escape velocity over Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law states, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure....

Lucas Käldström has a brilliant thesis out titled, “Encoding human-like operational knowledge using declarative Kubernetes operator patterns.” We sat down to talk about how, “Kubernetes operators form a novel programming model, allowing a shift from humans managing servers to servers managing servers, analogously to the Industrial Revolution.” I had a chance to speak with Lucas at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2022 in Valencia. This topic is pretty mind blowing. Lucas’ thesis is available via GitHub....