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.
Alexey Nizhegolenko has an excellent 3-part series of articles that cover the setup of Kubernetes on the bare metal servers. Here are the parts:
If that’s not a hand-holding walk-through guide, then I don’t know what is.
One thing that I like about the modern world is that large technology companies are a lot more open than they were in the previous century. Many of them contribute to the Open Source ecosystem and frequently share their wisdom on how to use and not to use a particular technology.
Have a look at the recent post from Bitbucket blog: Searching DynamoDB: An indexer sidecar for Elasticsearch, for example.
It’s not your usual marketing nonsense about introducing a new needless service or self-praising review of a product. It’s a rather deep dive into a technical topic that has been getting a lot of attention for the last few years – NoSQL databases. Not only the blog post itself is interesting, but it provides plenty of useful links to other resources. Like this one, which covers database partitioning in depth. Or this one, which lists some of the best practices for designing and using partition keys effectively.
I wish more companies shared their technical insights like this.
Logging, I think, is one of the least debated subjects in the software development. Everyone does it at least to some degree. Everyone agrees that good logs are important. But beyond that, there’s enough debate on what are the best practices, tools, and options. We need more of blog posts like this one and slides like these.
The other day I came across the classic “The Bastard Operator From Hell“. I don’t think that anybody knows how many of the BOFH stories were ever written, but this site has a good collection of them.
For those of you, who haven’t heard about BOFH, Wikipedia provides a good summary:
The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH) is a fictional rogue computer operator who takes out his anger on users and others who pester him with their computer problems, uses his expertise against his enemies and manipulates his employer.
Several other people have written stories about BOFHs, but those by Simon Travaglia are considered canonical. The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet by Travaglia, with some being reprinted in Datamation. They were published weekly from 1995 to 1999 in Network Week. Since 2000 they have been published regularly in The Register (UK). Several collections of the stories have been published as books.
By extension, the term is also used to refer to any system administrator who displays the qualities of the original.
The early accounts of the BOFH took place in a university; later the scenes were set in an office workplace. In 2000 (BOFH 2k), the BOFH and his pimply-faced youth (PFY) assistant moved to a new company.
If tech humor in the office is your thing, have a look at Dilbert comic strips as well.
Kraken by Uber:
Kraken is a P2P-powered Docker registry that focuses on scalability and availability. It is designed for Docker image management, replication and distribution in a hybrid cloud environment. With pluggable backend support, Kraken can easily integrate into existing Docker registry setups as the distribution layer.
Kraken has been in production at Uber since early 2018. In our busiest cluster, Kraken distributes more than 1 million blobs per day, including 100k 1G+ blobs. At its peak production load, Kraken distributes 20K 100MB-1G blobs in under 30 sec.