Cloud Native News - CNN21/03

CNCF & Community

• The First Six Months: CNCF Observations and 2021 Vision
  An inspiring article from Priyanka Sharma stating that CNCF is all about cutting edge innovation, dependable technology and collaboration between a global community of humans, who treat each other with respect as individuals. Priyanka shares her reflections and learnings on technology, leadership and her vision for 2021.
• Cloud Native Predictions for 2021 and Beyond
  2021 predictions of Chris Aniszczyk, VP of The Linux Foundation’s Developer Relations.

Cloud-Native Industry

• Logz.io: Truly Doubling Down on Open Source
  After Elastics announcement of changing their licensing to SSPL/Elastic License (and clarifying statement one and two), AWS announced an open source own fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Meanwhile Monitoring SaaS competitor Logz.io also announced to maintain an own fork that should eventually been contributed to CNCF. In my opinion, the preferrable fork.

Security

• Falco vs. AuditD from the HIDS perspective
  "In this blog, we will compare and contrast Falco vs. AuditD from a Host Intrusion Detection (HIDS) perspective." - important from my POV: Falco has more filters, less resource consumption and has pretty versatile outputs.
• The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let's Encrypt
  "Let's Encrypt helps to protect a huge portion of the Web by providing TLS certificates to more than 235 million websites. A database is at the heart of how Let's Encrypt manages certificate issuance. If this database isn't performing well enough, it can cause API errors and timeouts for our subscribers. Database performance is the single most critical factor in our ability to scale while meeting service level objectives. In late 2020, we upgraded our database servers and we've been very happy with the results."

CI/CD

• Build a Deployment Pipeline with Spinnaker on Kubernetes
  A walkthrough on building a continuous delivery pipeline with Spinnaker, focusing on deploying across various stages from dev to prod.

Storage

• CockroachDB vs. Scylla Benchmark
  From their description: "Scylla is the best-of-breed of NoSQL. CockroachDB is the best-of-breed of NewSQL. How does it work when you compare apples and oranges?" - nothing more to say ;)
• PostgreSQL on ARM-based AWS EC2 Instances: Is It Any Good?
  ARM is getting more and more popular. After successfully conquering the mobile market, it is getting more and more important in the server world. Companies and infrastructure teams should start to evaluate ARM as benefits such as performance increase and cost decrease are waving at the other side of the journey.

Infrastructure

• Firecracker: start a VM in less than a second
  Firecracker is KVM based and runs workloads in lightweight virtual machines. It powers services such as AWS Fargate or fly.io. Julia Evans wrote a nice little intro to how to use it and made a point: containers are not always the holy grail. Sometimes you need virtualization.

Containers & Orchestration

• Kubernetes API Priority and Fairness
  Since Kubernetes 1.20 APF is enabled by default. An exciting feature worth understanding better.
• Painless services: implementing serverless with rootless Podman and systemd
  Managing Podman via systemd is pretty common. Systemd's socket activation feature can be used to start a Podman container once a connection is received via a socket. Cool trick!

Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash