Hello friends! Ivan's here with the June roundup of all things Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, and Server-Side craft 🧙 What I was working on The first two lessons (and a few challenges) of my "Alternative Introduction to Dagger" course have not sparked much interest among my students, so I had to put this work on pause. With a heavy heart, though, because I do like Dagger, and I was enjoying working on the content about it. But no interest means fewer iximiuz Labs Premium subscribers, and I...
26 days ago • 3 min read
Hello friends! It's time for my traditional monthly roundup of all things Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, and Server-Side craft 🧙 Before we get started, I want you to know that this newsletter's previous issue (dispatched mid-May) was delivered to only about 1/5th of my usual email audience due to an unfortunate DNS misconfiguration. The good news is that you can still find it and all previous issues on newsletter.iximiuz.com. Also, if you reply to this email, it'd help to restore the domain's...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hello friends! Ivan's here - with another well overdue roundup of all things Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, and Server-Side craft 🧙 This time, I have a great excuse - in April, we became parents of a lovely little boy. Expectedly, he immediately made us overly busy for a few weeks, but no complaints! I wouldn't trade this business for anything else in my life ❤️ Now, to more technical news. What I was working on My main focus remains on iximiuz Labs 🚀 Content authoring redesign In March &...
2 months ago • 10 min read
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...
5 months ago • 7 min read
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...
5 months ago • 1 min read
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...
6 months ago • 1 min read
Hello friends! Ivan's here - with my traditional monthly roundup of all things Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, and Server-Side craft 🧙 What I was working on After my announcement of the iximiuz Labs GA earlier this month, the platform's usage has more than doubled, so I had to focus on the system's stability and UX. As a result, I increased observability and test coverage, added one more bare-metal server, streamlined a bunch of use cases, and fixed a few bugs. The most notable user-facing...
6 months ago • 3 min read
Hello friends! The first issue was rather a success, so here comes the second one in the new DevOps Challenge of the Week series. This week, I'm happily presenting you with another batch of challenges - again, united by a single topic. Fifty Shades of Container Runtimes Docker might be the most popular (and user-friendly) container runtime, but it's definitely not the only one. Podman is a Docker replacement (kinda) by Red Hat folks, with an interesting feature of being fully daemonless....
6 months ago • 1 min read
Hello friends! I asked on Twitter, and the reaction was only positive, so I'm trying it. This is a pilot issue of the new format - DevOps Challenge of the Week. This week, there will be not one but three challenges - all united by a single topic. Port Forwarding Port forwarding, a.k.a. port mapping or, in Docker’s parlance, port publishing, is a form of Network Address Translation (NAT) that redirects packets from one address to another. Different Forms of Port Forwarding I often use port...
6 months ago • 1 min read