“Money in the Bank,” a new story by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Maybe you know how to solder a bit, but you suck at it. Or it's frustrating and never comes out nice and you hate it.

Here's how to make it enjoyable, and get good results as a side effect.

We decided to use Terraform to configure our services. It lets you describe states of the infrastructure you want in plain text and takes care of calling the providers' API to provision some cloud resources. Resources and data are defined through .tf files and the generated state is stored by Terraform in a .tfstate file (local or in the cloud as we will see later on). It also permits to have an overview of what changes we are going to make using the plan subcommand.

We had the chance to see quite a bit of clusters in our years of experience with kubernetes (both managed and unmanaged - on GCP, AWS and Azure), and we see some mistakes being repeated. No shame in that, we’ve done most of these too!

I’ll try to show the ones we see very often and talk a bit about how to fix them.

A brief look at models for integrating Kubernetes clusters into existing networks.

Consul is a service mesh solution providing a full featured control plane with service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionality. Each of these features can be used individually as needed, or they can be used together to build a full service mesh. Consul requires a data plane and supports both a proxy and native integration model. Consul ships with a simple built-in proxy so that everything works out of the box, but also supports 3rd party proxy integrations such as Envoy.

Most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Enter this weekend's reading topic: Privacy.

“Alternate history, in my opinion, is a more demanding game,” says the author of “Agency” and other science fiction novels, “if only because conventional historical fiction, like history, is itself highly speculative.”

The need for IPv6 is greater than ever due to unprecedented Internet growth and the rapid, continual development of smart phones, tablet computers and other online-enabled devices. In February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the organization responsible for international IP address allocation, confirmed complete IPv4 resources depletion. Other global organizations have also reported critical limits on IPv4 address availability. In April 2011, the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Registry became the first of the IANA’s five regional registries to reach its IPv4 address limit. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is expected to follow suit in the near future.

I recently asked our writer community to share with us what they're reading. These folks come from all different walks of life and roles in tech. What they have in common is that they are living and breathing Linux and open source every day.

Drink in this fantastic list. Many of them are free and available to download.

You may see books you've been meaning to get around to, books that are completely new to you, and some that feel like old friends.

It’s early yet, but we’ll see once the bodies are buried

In the introductory article of this series I wrote that one of disadvantages of Podman and Buildah is that the technology is still pretty new and moves fast. This final article you are reading appeared with much delay because from Podman 1.3.1 to 1.4.1, one of the key features that we will look at in this article was broken.

Luckily, Podman 1.4.1 and above not only fixes features that were broken for a few weeks, but also has these features finally covered with tests. Hopefully, there will be no such dramatic loss in functionality in future releases. My original warning still applies though: new container technology toolchain is new and sometimes unstable. Keep that in mind.

Vielleicht hat selten jemand Foucault so konsequent und düster zu Ende gedacht wie Mark Fisher, vielleicht hat es auch kaum jemand wirklich ausgehalten, ihn so zu Ende zu denken, wie man sagt, zu Ende denken, wenn es das überhaupt gibt, etwas zu Ende zu denken, jemanden zu Ende zu denken, überhaupt etwas irgendwann zu Ende zu denken – vielleicht sollte man auch einfach viele Gedanken lieber erst gar nicht zu Ende zu denken, damit man sich selbst nicht aus Versehen dabei auch noch zu Ende denkt, vielleicht ist das aber auch schon eine Spur der Macht, dass wir bestimmte Gedanken nicht zu Ende denken, weil wir wissen, was auf uns warten würde, würden wir einen bestimmten Gedanken bis an sein Ende durchspielen.

The idea of “smart cities” – the application of digital technologies to the urban environment – is much in vogue. But as this blog has noted, although potentially powerful, the approach does raise serious issues for privacy. Perhaps the most ambitious “smart city” project so far is one involving a sister company of Google, Sidewalk Labs. After looking at over 50 possible partners it choose to work with the Canadian city of Toronto. Sidewalk Toronto was announced in October last year, and involves the redevelopment of a publicly-owned space of more than 800 acres, one of North America’s largest areas of underdeveloped urban land.

Performance is a feature. This book provides a hands-on overview of what every web developer needs to know about the various types of networks (WiFi, 3G/4G), transport protocols (UDP, TCP, and TLS), application protocols (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2), and APIs available in the browser (XHR, WebSocket, WebRTC, and more) to deliver the best—fast, reliable, and resilient—user experience.

Integrating systems that every day grow larger is a complex task. Apache Kafka is a software that tries to solve this by using events. In this article, we are going to give you an Apache Kafka introduction. So that you get an understanding of what it is and how to get started with it.