tobru.guru Newsletter #3

Hi,

Welcome to edition number 3 of the tobru.guru Newsletter. Enjoy all the links collected and curated over the past days and weeks.

News

Software releases, news articles and other new stuff

Release v0.11.0 · crossplane/crossplane · GitHub
#crossplane, #kubernetes, #provisioning

The v0.11.0 release officially introduces Crossplane as the Kubernetes runtime for the Open Application Model. Improved documentation and expanded support for infrastructure composition serve to clearly establish the core features of Crossplane and the separation of concern it provides for different personas within a team or organization. Rounding out the release are improved security measures, support for new managed resources, and the convergence on Packages as the installation unit for Crossplane extensions.

Crossplane has increased the speed of new releases which is good to see. On the downside I still wait for an official way to upgrade between the releases. This is the missing piece to have Crossplane in beta releases of Project Syn.

Grafana v7.0 released: New plugin architecture, visualizations, transformations, native trace support, and more | Grafana Labs
#grafana, #graphing

The Grafana 7.0 release is full of major new features and enhancements. Find out all the details here.

What should I say? Grafana is by far my most loved graphing tool and I use it daily for looking at collected data from my IoT projects.

ngine.io - Scales with your Cloud
#ansible, #automation, #cloud

Cloud computing has changed the way software gets developed, applications get deployed and even how companies have organised. The Cloud is no longer a matter of if, it is matter of when. We are your ngine, the engine through the clouds. Our mission: Sustainable Cloud solutions focused on three key facotrs: Integrate, automate, scale!

This is the new project of René Moser / @resmo79 who currently works at a company called Puzzle ITC. I know René from several Meetups and he is clearly the guy who knows Ansible and infrastructure provisioning very well. Looking forward to see more of ngine.io!

Release Notes: distri supersilverhaze (2020-05-16)
#os, #distribution, #linux

Distri is an experimental Linux distribution of Michael Stapelberg, a former Debian developer. It's interesting to follow such experiments and see where they are heading to.


Articles

Interesting articles and blog posts

Building a video conferencing solution in 24 hours - SWITCH
#jitsi, #sysadmin

An agile sprint: crafting a prototype within 24 hours, a well-functioning service within 4 weeks and a stable, scalable video conference solution within 6 weeks.An agile sprint: crafting a prototype within 24 hours, a well-functioning service within 4 weeks and a stable, scalable video conference solution within 6 weeks.

The Corona crisis does not only bring bad things, it also inspires people to do nice things, like hosting Jitsi and offering it for free. Thank you @jcfischer and SWITCH for this great initiative!

Using PyInstaller to Easily Distribute Python Applications – Real Python
#python, #packaging, #distribution

In this step-by-step tutorial, you'll learn how to use PyInstaller to turn your Python application into an executable with no dependencies or installation required. This is great if you want to distribute applications to users who may or may not be Python developers.

While looking for a way to easily deploy a Python application to many VMs, Raspis, ... I found this good write-up about PyInstaller.

Mistakes made and lessons learned with Kubernetes and GitOps | Luke’s blog
#kubernetes, #debugging, #helm, #gitops

I’m writing this article to hopefully spare you some pain and frustration, and perhaps give some insight into the problems you will face.

GitOps is the new hype it seems and people are writing interesting Blogs about their experience. This is one of such a Blog, worth a read.

It's Time to Get Back Into RSS | Daniel Miessler
#rss, #newsreader

A lot of people who were on the internet in the early 2000’s remember something called RSS. It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it allowed content creators to publish updates to the world in a well-understood format.

YES! This inspired me to start using an RSS reader again and start collecting interesting RSS feeds. After a few years of not using RSS, I rediscovered its great use. Maybe this helps me to stop using Twitter as news source?

What the heck happened with .org? - The Mozilla Blog
#domain, #icann

If you are following the tech news, you might have seen the announcement that ICANN withheld consent for the change of control of the Public Interest Registry and that this had some implications for .org.

If you want to get some insights how TLDs are managed and operated, this article is for you! I definitively learned something while reading it.

Resolving the AddTrust External CA Root certificate expiration - Oh Dear blog
#tls, #certificate

Some of our users have received reports that their AddTrust External CA Root certificate is about to expire in less than 14 days. Here's how you can fix that.

Reminder: Check all the certificates in the chain!


Tools

Open Source tools newly discovered

GitHub - christopherhein/github-controller: Kubernetes Controller for managing Github
#kubernetes, #operator, #github, #gitops

Github Controller is a Kubernetes controller which implements the Kubernetes Resource Model to manage Github repositories, organizations and collaborators. This does so by implementing custom resource definitions (CRDs) for Repository, (Coming Soon Organization, and Team).

Managing things from Kubernetes via a custom Operator/Controller is really the new automation framework as it seems. The Project Syn Lieutenant Operator manages remote Git repositories as well, to enable easy GitOps.

SeaTable - A new kind of collaborating table and table based information management system
#database, #spreadsheet, #nocode

SeaTable is a new application that combines spreadsheet with database. It allows you to manage many kinds of information as easily as a spreadsheet, while being as powerful as a dedicated information management application. With APIs and SDKs, you may quickly adapt SeaTable to your use cases, automate data processing and business processes.

Baserow: Open source online database tool
#database, #spreadsheet, #nocode

Create your own database without technical experience. Our user friendly no-code tool gives you the powers of a developer without leaving your browser.

OAM | Open Application Model Specification
#kubernetes, #devops, #crossplane, #oam

A team-centric standard for building cloud native apps.
Open Application Model [OAM] describes a model where developers are responsible for defining application components.
While application operators are responsible for creating instances of those components and assigning them application configurations.
And infrastructure operators are responsible for declaring, installing, and maintaining the underlying services that are available on the platform.

This sounds interesting! And as Crossplane implements this model, I certainly will discover more about it in the future.

OAuth2 Proxy
#oauth, #authentication, #proxy

A reverse proxy and static file server that provides authentication using Providers (Google, GitHub, and others) to validate accounts by email, domain or group.

This tool will be added to my GitOps tooling to protect some apps which do not offer any authentication mechanism. Gitea will be the Oauth2 provider.

GitHub - sbstp/kubie: A more powerful alternative to kubectx and kubens
#kubernetes, #shell, #kubectl

kubie is an alternative to kubectx, kubens and the k on prompt modification script. It offers context switching, namespace switching and prompt modification in a way that makes each shell independent from others. It also has support for split configuration files, meaning it can load Kubernetes contexts from multiple files.

GitHub - xxh/xxh: 🚀 Bring your favorite shell wherever you go through the ssh
#shell, #ssh, #zsh, #dotfiles

You stuffed command shell with aliases, tools and colors but you lose it all when using ssh. The mission of xxh is to bring your favorite shell wherever you go through the ssh without root access and system installations.

That's it! How did you like it? Do you have something interesting to share? Let me know on Twitter or in a reply to this newsletter.

Thanks for reading and take care.

Cheers,
Tobias

PS: You can always read past issues in the archive.

PPS: Have a look at the latest VSHN.timer issue which brings some more interesting news to you.

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