Software Engineer at day. Tech Storyteller at night. Helping people master Containers.
iximiuz Labs update: First Content is in, Invites are out 🚀
Hello friends!
I've got some news!
First off, I just released the first piece of real content via iximiuz Labs - it's a tutorial Why and How to Use containerd From Command Line. The key "feature" of it is that it's backed by an automated solution checker.
The new tutorial format resembles my "classic" blog posts, but the materials are sprinkled with assignments, and students are expected to interact with the tutorial using the terminal on the right, while the background solution checker keeps a close eye on the state of the microVM. Any combination of the user's actions that brings the system to the "correct" state will make the text on the left send the student a positive reinforcement signal.
There were a lot of fun technical challenges behind this work, and I'll be happy to share them in greater detail in the nearest future, but for now, let me jump straight to the second portion of the news...
"Invite-wall" is going away!
Now anyone with a GitHub account can use the labs. It's still (very) early beta, so all sorts of bugs are expected, and servers can also run out of capacity at some point, but I really want to let as many folks as possible try out the platform.
What's next? I put a lot of effort into iximiuz Labs over the past half a year - all development still happens only in my free time (read - weekends, holidays, and vacations) - but with the last release, I may very well be done with the first version of the engine! So, I'm really looking forward to finally switching back from writing mostly code to doing more balanced work and reviving this newsletter and my other educational activities.
Have fun, do labs, and stay tuned!
Best
Ivan
P.S. Invite-wall is gone, but your support is still much needed!
Ivan Velichko
Software Engineer at day. Tech Storyteller at night. Helping people master Containers.
Hello friends! Ivan's here - with a well overdue February roundup of all things Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, and Server-Side craft 🧙 What I was working on A lot of stuff on the dev side - not so much on the content side. But things are soon to reverse 🤞 Announcing labCTL - the long-awaited iximiuz Labs CLI A dozen people have asked me over the past year-ish if there'll be access to the playgrounds from the local terminal and not only from the browser. And while I myself wanted this feature...
Hello there! 👋 Debugging containerized applications is... challenging. Debugging apps that use slim variants of container images is double challenging. And debugging slim containers in hardened production environments is often close to impossible. Before jumping to the DevOps problems that I prepared for you this week, let's review a few tricks that can be used to troubleshoot containers. If the container has a shell inside, running commands in it with docker exec (or kubectl exec) is...
Hey hey! Are you ready for your next DevOps challenge? Last week, we all witnessed yet another terrifying cyber-security event, and this time, it was a direct hit - researchers from Snyk discovered a way to break out of containers! 🤯 The vulnerability was found in the fundamental component of the containerization ecosystem - the most popular implementation of the (low-level) OCI container runtime - runc. Notice how, on the diagram above, most high-level container runtimes actually rely on the...