cloudnative – Christian Frank

War in Europe, weeks 90 and 91, weeks 6 and 7

The war in Ukraine drags on, and the Tsar continues to slaughter innocent civilians for his personal gain.

Unfortunately, the Tsar has found a new ally in Europe – the Dutch have elected a far-right politician for president. Together with Hungary’s president, the two ultra-nationalists do not bode well for our efforts to protect the Ukraine and thus ourselves against the Tsar’s imperialist ambitions.

The Arab-Israeli war has entered a new phase, with a temporary truce and the exchange of hostages. For the sake of the people living there, I hope they will soon reach a step toward lasting peace!

But I am skeptical; the military leaders of Hamas, like the Tsar, have no interest in protecting the lives and well-being of civilians; their only interest lies in their respective ideologies of power and the illusion of their own grandeur.

Two weeks from now, the Earth Social Conference will start in Casanare, Colombia. The program is almost complete, logistics are in place, and I can’t wait to meet all the other climate activists from around the globe to build a realistic alternative to the COP.

KubeCon in Chicago was good but less energetic than the spring conference in Amsterdam. And there were new Geekos!

(Geekos on the shelf, Cologne, 11/16.23)

LDW +3

Three years ago was my last day at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and now my time at the university is coming to a close, too.

Two years ago, there were no signs of all the changes the pandemic would bring.

A year ago, we were already fighting with the pandemic, and I was already doing regular walks with my buddy Machop.

Today, I will go on another walk with him.

But, I am still as excited as I was three years ago, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds!

(Machop with a gift and Twitch, Cologne, 4/9/21)

Rancher Meetup Group

One of my upcoming New Year’s resolutions is to run regular meetups in my home town, Cologne.

To do this, I’ve started a new meetup group on Rancher in Cologne, my most favorite open source tool for compute in Enterprise IT.

The Group is called Rancher Meetup Cologne, and I’ve scheduled our first meeting for January 14th, on all what’s new in Rancher 2.3.

Hope to see you there!

Vagabundo

During the winter developer’s conference at Senacor Technologies AG in Nuremberg, they presented a nice little tool to measure and offset carbon dioxide emissions during business travel.

The tool is called Vagabundo and is realized using a serverless framework; it collects data from all business travels, calculates CO2 emissions and offsets them through Atmosfair – great approach at using technology to protect our climate!

It’s currently an in-house project, but Senacor seemed amiable to open-source it.

Much more than the offsetting part, I like the reporting – how much CO2 do I emit during travel and how could I optimize it?

Taking this a step further, I could see creating internal (team) competitions – who’s the best at having video conferences instead of in-person meetings? Who’s able to reduce air travel the most?

I think, there’re endless possibilities – anybody as interested as I am?

Wine quality

As part of a school machine learning project I stumbled upon the excellent tutorial by Elite Data Science on Scikit and wine quality.

This tutorial uses a data set on wine quality for training and testing provided by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

As we’re nearing the end of life on Python 2.x, I’ve updated the tutorial script to work with Python 3.5.3 (on Debian 9).

Great starting point to work with new data – I can highly recommend the tutorial!

Freelance Rancher

After a brief stint at a small consultancy in Cologne I decided to go back to working as a freelance IT architect and consultant, with my favorite open source cloud projects, Rancher and Kubernetes, and everything else cloud native. I have also submitted a couple of papers to regional conferences.

From August onwards I’ll then have two more years at University, and during that time I’ll need to figure out whether I should be starting my own business, continue going solo, or try to find full-time employment again. Main goal: Get my kids through college. And enjoy my work.

On that note: I’ve passed all exams so far and am happy with the results!

Server housekeeping

From time to time it does make sense to clean your computer systems, literally speaking.

Especially if you run them in a domestic or office setting, any system with a fan will collect dust. A lot of dust.

Nothing a can of pressurized air, a hoover and a set of baby wipes can’t fix though .

Did anyone say weekend?

FreeBSD

Being a long-time Linux user and ardent fan of Debian GNU/Linux, I find myself more and more in a situation where I favor a BSD-style Unix over Linux.

My first real contact with FreeBSD was through the now sadly defunct Debian GNU/kfreebsd distribution, the next logical step was to set up a FreeBSD workstation (with KDE) and now there’s no turning back. One of the main benefits of using Linux over Windows was always to have fine granular control of all the processes and steps – systemd is way too much Windows-like for my taste. Nothing against Windows – I do all my daily office work on Microsoft Windows and Office, but on my servers and workstations I want a shell prompt and full control.

I still run Debian on my GCP cloud servers, for my next server at home I’ve settled on FreeBSD though.

I did have a look at the possibility to replace systemd with SysV-init on Debian, I also looked at Devuan, but in the end the simplicity and elegance of FreeBSD won me over.

(https://www.freebsd.org/art.html)

Inbox Zero

Today is a slow day – Friday after a bank holiday (Ascension), which most people here take off from work (including myself).

Time to appreciate my inbox. My empty inbox, that is.

Ever since I came across Inbox Zero, I tried to stick to it, most of the time. According to its inventor, Merlin Mann, it’s not so much about reducing the number of Emails in your inbox, but about reducing the time you’re thinking about the things in your inbox. From personal experience over many years of working I can fully and wholeheartedly agree – an empty inbox makes your day much less stressful!

I’ve settled on Outlook, Tasks, and OneNote to manage my work, but it’s not the tooling that makes the difference, it’s the mindset.

Give it a try – you won’t regret it!

(Screenshot of an empty inbox, Microsoft Office 365)

Rancher 2.2 User Meetup

This week we had a Rancher User Meetup in Cologne, and Jan Bruder of Rancher introduced us to the new features in 2.2:

Built-in cluster and application monitoring
Global DNS
Multi-tenant catalogs
Backup and Restore for Kubernetes configuration (etcd)
Bitbucket support for pipelines

It was a great session and many thanks to Jan (and Rancher) for coming!

(Taken at location: Gute Botschafter GmbH, Cologne)