Cloud-Native-Tech

Wow – I had no idea this newsletter idea would become so popular so soon. Thanks everyone for signing up! I want to keep this as interesting as possible. Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends and colleagues. And please send feedback or ideas anytime – I am always open for suggestions (e.g. via Twitter @bbrundert).

Pivotal Container Service
In case you missed it last week: Pivotal Container Service is now generally available. Check out these blogposts that capture some of the highlights:

• https://content.pivotal.io/blog/secure-multitenant-kubernetes-in-minutes-pivotal-container-service-goes-ga
• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2018/02/12/pivotal-container-service-ga/ 

Here is the download link for Pivotal Container Service (PKS) on Pivotal Network. You need to create an account to get to the download bits. Documentation can be found here. 

VMware Cloud Native Applications and Platform News

• Beyond The Phoenix Project Audio Series & The 5th Anniversary Edition Of The Phoenix Project – great to see new content on the 5th anniversary of the Phoenix Project. Still one of my favorite references when speaking to customers about the DevOps.
• Interesting overview about core concepts of Service Mesh with Kubernetes – great overview without going into the details of Linkerd, Istio or Conduit. 
• Going deep into how the Kubernetes concept of “Deployments” works. 
• #111 Google Cloud Platform with Sam Ramji has some pretty cool insights and I found it pretty inspirational – the interview starts at 3:50 min. Sam talks about “Codecation” (learning to code on vacation), “distribution cognition” and the human aspects of computing but also the future and role of computing in general. He also highlights the need for Edge Computing (see above) by saying that “computing is everywhere” that there are lots of reasons for “why computing belongs everywhere”. 
• Using Go as a scripting language in Linux
• Prometheus vs. Heapster vs. Kubernetes Metrics APIs

Last week I started a small experiment that I have been thinking about for some time now: a newsletter about all-things “Cloud-Native”. I have been using Twitter and RSS/feedly for quite some time now to keep up with my favorite areas of technology. But it’s tough – there is just too much going on. Some people asked me how I keep up with all these fast-moving topics and news and also stay engaged e.g. on Twitter. In essence, I made this part of my daily routine and I keep improving that practice each day. I also found inspiration on some other newsletters that I started to find useful for myself (e.g. cron.weekly or devops weekly) – in a world of literally 1000s new updates per day, a solid newsletter can be quite valuable.

Over the past years I already captured content from various channels that I found useful and shared that in a structured manner with my customers. But I feel there might be value in this – now laser focused on Cloud-Native – even for people outside of my direct network. So I decided to formalize it even further and offer my very personal summary of highlights from the week in a newsletter. From a tool perspective I picked tinyletter because it feels like there isn’t much overhead for the sender, it has a clean interface and a pretty straight-forward archive option.  

• “A Look into the Kubernetes Master Components” by @tom_schwaller: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2018/02/20/kubernetes-master-components/ 
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Keynotes and Full Agenda for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Copenhagen

• Transparent Container Networking across Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Container Service, OpenShift and Virtual Machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN4eJk3C7uc – a super awesome demo by @yfauserduring TechFieldDay
• OpenFaaS founder Alex Ellis is joining VMware’s growing VMware Open Source Technology Center team to continue his defining work in Functions as a Service (FaaS): https://blogs.vmware.com/opensource/2018/02/19/vmware-welcomes-alex-ellis/
  Learn more about OpenFaaS here: https://www.openfaas.com/ 
• There is a new set of Cloud Native Applications video learning resources available at : https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/cloud-native-video-resources/ – check it out to learn more about containers, kubernetes, Pivotal Container Service, vSphere Integrated Containers and much more!
• A brand new “Containers and Container Networking for Network Engineers” whitepaper is now available at https://communities.vmware.com/thread/581308, you can also find a lot of great information in the NSX-T Reference Design Guide that was also released this week: https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2018/02/introducing-vmware-nsx-t-reference-design.html/

• Understanding and using the Kubernetes PodNodeSelector Admission Controller – https://embano1.github.io/post/podnodesel/ by @embano1
• Running Kubernetes on VMware – a brief overview about the options http://blog.think-v.com/?p=5651
• “Your Database Should Work Like a CDN”: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/distributed-database-performance/ (not an andorsement of CockroachDB but an interesting thought)
• “The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes” – I specifically like the quote “Find your favorite VAR and demand vanilla Kubernetes, in any form, that’s reasonably up-to-date and has a well-proven plan for handling upgrades. Then forget about it and focus on building on its abstractions and the things around it that actually impact your product.” – https://gravitational.com/blog/kubernetes-release-cycle/#