Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

Slimming down Docker images

It’s been a while since I posted anything about Docker.  That’s mostly because I still don’t really use it for anything – playing around locally, testing and learning doesn’t count yet.

But just to keep the ball rolling, here are a couple of handy links for the ideas on how to improve your Docker images, so that Docker uses much less space, benefits more from caching, and brings up the containers faster:

Both articles are around the same theme – choose your  base image carefully, try to minimize the layers, use only what you need, and don’t forget to clean up the disk space with “docker system prune“.

The most dangerous word in software development

I think this article – The Most Dangerous Word In Software Development – hits the nail on the head.

“Just” implies that all of the thinking behind a feature or system has been done. Even worse, it implies that all of the decisions that will have to be made in the course of development have already been discovered—and that’s never the case.

Every time somebody asks for “just” this little thing or that little thing, I ask them to “just describe it”, or “just answer a few questions”, or “just pay for it”.  Somehow, it never turns up as easy and simple in the opposite direction.

Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

Red Hat issued a press release announcing that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS Inc.

RALEIGH, N.C. —  — Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc., an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million, subject to certain adjustments at closing that are not expected to be material. Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source. By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.
I find it to be very significant.  Have a look at other Red Hat acquisitions, especially lately, as well as their other programs and projects.

Getting the best performance out of Amazon EFS

Jeff Geerling shares his tips for “Getting the best performance out of Amazon EFS”.  Given how (still) new the Amazon EFS is and how limited is the documentation of the best practices, this stuff is golden.

tl;dr: EFS is NFS. Networked file systems have inherent tradeoffs over local filesystem access—EFS doesn’t change that. Don’t expect the moon, benchmark and monitor it, and you’ll do fine.

Nerd Fonts – Iconic font aggregator, collection, and patcher

Nerd Fonts is a collection of fonts for people who work with code snippets, command line, and text-based user interface applications.  The fonts are also patched with additional popular icon sets like Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others.