Tag: conferences

My Node.js Story

Once upon a time in a part of the tech universe far far away, there was a general consensus to block all JavaScript from browser execution. It was the way things were because JavaScript was seen as harmful. You see, the early miscreants of that time had used JavaScript to write all sorts of problematic code that would attack, steal, or otherwise undermine the data one sent across and received on the internet. This is the time I could have started learning JavaScript, but because of its horrid reputation I stayed far away and wrote C, C++, C#, Java, and event some RPG, COBOL, Pascal, and some other code. It was glorious, and the languages were beautiful in their own ways, while JavaScript was shunned by almost everybody in that tech universe! **

Today, things aren’t all that much different, but we make it easier for the whole horde of miscreant scripters to write problematic code in JavaScript. The difference is we allow it everywhere and just try to catch it and prevent execution. Thus, different, but the same, it’s a crazy world we live in.

I started picking up a little JavaScript at the tail end of 2007, when the “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide” was the top book to delve deeply into using JavaScript. It wasn’t another year until the seminal “JavaScript: The Good Parts” cut down the size of what one really needed to delve into by removing the cruft and focusing on the good parts. Slowly, JavaScript was finally starting to take shape as something useful.

Writing JavaScript at this time was a mutant challenge of having it look like Java while being organized like a trash pile of scripts that had no way to manage dependencies or otherwise. I mean, NPM was years away from existing, and really the concept of libraries in JavaScript seemed to be a foreign concept at the time.

2008 rolled around, “JavaScript: The Good Parts” came out, the changes started rippling through the industry and as traction started to mount. The penultimate event occurred the following year in 2009, which at the time almost nobody noticed. Dahl started Node.js at Joyent to enable server side JavaScript code use. At the time, many were flummoxed by the notion, weren’t confident in the single threaded event loop, and overall its release and the project continuing were in jeopardy from this point.

But the project continued and persisted!

Continue reading “My Node.js Story” →

Kubernetes 101 Workshop

Today I TA’d (Teacher’s Assistant) a course with Bridget at GOTO Chicago Conference. There were a number of workshops besides just the Kubernetes 101 like; Working Effectively with Legacy Code with Michael Feathers (@mfeathers), Estimates or NoEstimates with Woody Zuill (@WoodyZuill), Testing Faster with Dan North (@tastapod), Data Science and Analytics for Developers (Machine Learning) with Phil Winder (@DrPhilWinder), and so many others that I’d love to have multi-processed all at the same time! Digging through Kubernetes from a 101 course level was interesting, as I’ve never formally tried to educate myself about Kubernetes, just dove in. My own knowledge is very random about what I do or don’t know about, and a 101 course fills out some of the gaps for me.

The conference is located in a cool and sort of strange place for a conference, out kind of in the lake, called the Navy Pier. Honestly, I dig it, it’s a cool place for a conference. I enjoyed the ~15 minute walk from the hotel to the location too, because it’s right there on the tip of the pier, as shown in the fancy map below.

chicagonavypier

The workshop is going well. Bridget is filling up student’s brains and I’m going to dork around Kuberneting some Cassandra and Node.js for my talk. I’m pretty stoked as the talk has given me a good excuse to delve into some Node.js again, from a nodal systemic viewpoint, “Node Systems for Node.js Services on Nodes of Systemic Nodal Systems” this Thursday.

Kubecon Day 2 Keynotes

kubelogo-wide

Kelsey Hightower, Chen Goldberg, and Anthony Yeh

Day two kicked off (read on for day one wrap up) with Kelsey Hightower, Chen Goldberg, and Anthony Yeh. The big push from Kelsey and team focused their keynote around the development story around Kubernetes. Specifically, that a developers and apps users, should never need to know they’re using Kubernetes. He, Chen, and Anthony all talked about the idea we developers – as I’ll offer is true – want to work within our workflow committing, tagging, and knowing our applications will appear in test, development, QA, UAT, and production as we work.

Continue reading “Kubecon Day 2 Keynotes” →

Good Morning KubeCon?

kubelogo-wideI hope you’re having a good morning so far. KubeCon has kicked off in full force like the pro-conference that it is. With 4k+ people in attendance the crowds are distinctive, even among a city like Austin. The conference lit off the day with an absurdly early registration time of 7am, and a continental breakfast of some fruit and pastries.

Keynote(s)

Dan Kohn

The keynotes this morning kicked off at 9am. Dan Kohn, the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), started off the keynote session. He started off with a simple story about communities building. Outlining a quote from Tim Hockin, “existing time for boring infrastructure”. This really wraps up so much of everything happening in this space these days.

“Exciting time for boring infrastructure.”

Dan continued, pointing out that Linux is one of the largest projects on Github and probably one of the, if not the most important project on Github. Kubernetes is in the top 10 on Github too, as Jim Zemlin said, “Kubernetes is the Linux of the Cloud”. The commit and member involvement in Kubernetes. The growth of the KubeCon event and how this event in Austin is 4x the last 4 KubeCon events! Huge growth.

“Kubernetes is the Linux of the Cloud” – Jim Zemlin

Dan then introduced an unexpected speaker from Alibaba that elaborated on the massive scale of Alibaba, its leading position in China, and other projects Alibaba is doing with Kubernetes.

NOTE: Diveristy Scholarship

The US failed to provide visas for 4 of the diversity scholarship recipients. However they’ve been offered to attend the Copenhagen event, which in the end the US has taken more more hit because of our poor immmigration and border control rules in the United States. Something that needs to be modernized, and I’m sure we’ll keep losing out for years to come until national leadership has the spine to fix this. But I digress, onward with the keynote.

Michelle Noorali

Michelle Noorali, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, then was introduced and came out to provide information on Special Interest Groups (SIGs), the deep dive sessions, techincal salons, and hallway tracks, and more details.

She continued to give us the story of KubeCon, Kubernetes, and the distinct history of how the rise of microservices, cloud, and container technology has changed the landscape of infrastructure and related technology. This is something important as the story isn’t always clear, but the story is a fundamental detail that informs and provides a more clearly defined path to where we’re all going with this technology.

Next Michelle dove into some specifics about the Workloads API coming in Kubernetes 1.9. For one it’ll be stable. Another is Windows Server container support beta, which I guess is stable – I haven’t used it and am curious who is, I’d love to talk!

Michelle then introduced Tom Wilkie to talk about observability and Prometheus.

Next up she introduced Eduardo Silva to discuss fluentd and announce the v1.0 release. Highlights include multi-process workers, sub-second time resolution, native TLS/SSL, otimized protocol buffers, and improved Fluentd protocol buffers. He continued and elaborated on the data streaming options, and flowing to technology like Kafka. Also, fluentd has been ported to Windows finally so Windows Server users can now natively use fluentd.

Reliability? What’s that? Oliver Gould then introduced by Michelle to talk about linkerd and give us some insight to the progress of the tool. Oliver then introduced Conduit too, and then gave us a demo of it working.

Michelle then came back around to wrap up her section of the keynote and cover some additional projects within the CNCF; grpc, envoy, and such.

Imad Sousou

Next up Imad Sousou came out to talk about introducing container runtimes at Intel.

NOTE: Just for your information, Intel isn’t just processor chips.

Intel have thousands of software developers actually working on a lot of various software projects. Intel is also a company that has a fairly large number of people working on open source projects.

Imad then elaborated on Kata containers that are hardware accelerated containers that use virtualization technology.

Diane Marsh

Diane Marsh of Netflix came out next to discuss the importance of culture of building these tools, and what happens with these tools. The core of the talk focused around tools Spinnaker, Asgard – namely continuous delivery – and other Netflix OSS and how culture plays a part. She detailed how Netflix culture affected how people accepted and were able to use Asgard or Spinnaker. For instance, the culture at Netflix is one of freedom, and many companies don’t have this level of maturity. Netflix has this level of freedom, to deploy, because of a very strong level of trust.

Adrian Cockroft

Finally to wrap up the morning keynote, Adrian Cockroft came out to show us a few things. Leading of with cloud native principles; immutable code deployments, high utilization with aggressive efficiency by turning things off, pay as you go, no waiting globally deployed and distributed models. At AWS he’s working to increase the contributions AWS makes, working with CNCF (which they’ve joined), pushing cloud native, and integrating CNCF components (all those projects) into AWS.

Some of the projects AWS is involved in include; containerd, kubernetes installers and security, and CNI, the Container Networking Interface.

Adrian also noted, importantly, that all AWS work with Kubernetes is upstreamed to Kubernetes itself and not a fork of the project. They’re working toward making all integration at all levels within AWS. Some of the work even include work and partnerships with Heptio around authentication for IAM within AWS. Lots of good things, and a lot of high integrity work!

Beyond Kubernetes and other elements Adrian’s teams are working on integrations with SPIFFE, HashiCorp Vault, and other open source tooling. I for one am pretty excited aobut these tools coming online at AWS as it’ll make my life easier to get some great things deployed and enabling customers and groups I work with! “Much excite, much wow” as the internet would say.

Adrian then dove into Fargate, discussed how it folds in with EKS, and how the integration is going to work.

For now, that’s that for the keynote.

KubeCon – Arrival, Flight, and Scheduling

I’m on another plane departing Seattle via SEATAC (SEA). An Alaska Air Boeing 737-900 to be specific. The flight is currently en route to Austin, Texas and the vast majority of people aboard are going to KubeCon. The seats, as they always are, aren’t built for any mortal, normal, reasonably sized human being. So we’re all cuddled up annoyingly but making the best of it we can. Seriously though, I’d rather be on an overnight train. I’d rather spend another 24+ or more hours comfortably studying some Netflix infrastructer and chilling out instead of flying, but that isn’t really an option in this giant country, so onward I go as the dream of comfort in transportation eludes me.

I’m setup and am aiming to provide coverage of numerous events, topics, and the like while at the conference. To boot, after conference I’ll be writing up some coverage of open source projects and companies that are at KubeCon.

cncf_kubecon_color_new-1There are a few new practices, techniques, and related things I’m trying out so I can cover even more of the event with useful things. We’ll see how that works. As always, much of my coverage will be on the various mediums I post to. The rest may appear in other various sources, which I’ll tweet and provide a summary email via my Thrashing Code News at the end of the conference.

My Schedule -> https://kccncna17.sched.com/adronhall
Here are a few of the specific things I’ve got on the roster.

Wednesday

  • Pancake Breakfast with The New Stack cuz’ they’re freakin’ awesome!
  • Dan, Michelle, Imad, Dianne, and Adrian’s keynote!
  • Panel: Kubernetes, Cloud Native and the Public Cloud [B] – Moderated by Dan Kohn, Cloud Native Computing Foundation
  • Full Stack Visibility with Elastic: Logs, Metrics, and Traces
  • The Art of Documentation and Readme.md for Open Source Projects

…and a bunch more to come! Subscribe to Thrashing Code News, follow me on the twitters @Adron, and I’ll have more coverage coming soon!