Giant Conversations

*From an article shared within Giant Swarm. Not (necessarily) our POV. Giant Conversations Episode #25 Episode Date: November 28 2024 Topic: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Contributors: Puja Abbassi Franco Hielpos Fernando Ripoll Joseph Salisbury Łukasz Piątkowski Jonas Zeiger Simon Weald * Zach Stone Swarmalicious News Web Scraping in 2024: Protect Ya Neck. (Wu-Tang Clan Reference) The two main keys of web scraping in 2024 are infrastructure & tactics. With affordable & easily accessible defenses like Cloudflare, even small apps can protect themselves in a way that can stop most scrapers. But if you want to scrape at scale for fun or profit the process is outlined step-by-step. Our friends at Kinvolk have cracked the code - The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Flatcar as a CNCF incubating project "A secure community-owned cloud native operating system was one of the missing layers of the CNCF technology stack,” said Chris ANI - STÜCK, CTO of CNCF. Flatcar has hit several milestones in the last several months, which have contributed to the project’s move to the incubator: - System Extensions. Leveraging the capabilities introduced in recent systemd releases, Flatcar has adopted system extensions (sysexts) as the strategic path forward for customizing and enhancing the base operating system. - Run in more places. Flatcar supports more operating environments than ever, including ARM64-based servers, with Azure Cobalt being a recent addition; out of the box support for Nvidia Tesla GPUs for AI workloads; and many public clouds. - Cluster API. The upstream Cluster API project now supports Ignition-based distros including Flatcar, and there are Cluster API integrations for Flatcar with a variety of platforms including Azure, AWS, and VMware. GitPod is leaving Kubernetes. This is not a story of whether or not to use Kubernetes for production workloads. It's also not the process of how to build a comprehensive soup-to-nuts developer experience for shipping applications on Kubernetes. This is the story of how (not) to build development environments in the cloud. What makes a {dev} platform? Joe Beda recently gave a talk and drafted a comprehensive document about what makes a Dev. platform. Our colleague Łukasz Piątkowski said that this excerpt really stood out to him: "It is obvious to many, but I want to stress that an API is critical to any platform. The API is the purest expression of your object model. While you can imagine a platform that is completely UI based and focused on non or casual developers, an API is almost always a must. Platforms are built to be built upon. Assuming you will always be at the “top of the stack” will limit your reach." Rejekts NA If you're looking for a way to trick image scanners and get down to zero CVEs - there's a talk for that. From Cloud Native Rejekts NA 2024. Duffy Cooley and Kyle Quest go over how to do just that. Building an Application-Specific Container Image Builder | James Laverack Lightning talk about going too far to solve a problem. In his self-proclaimed talk about "perhaps the most boring title I could write". His goal was to put a modified version of Minecraft into his Kubernetes Cluster at home and ran into all kinds of issues. He opened up with how he actually got it done: Multithreaded Rust programs building handcrafted artisanal multi-architecture container images by rewriting tarballs in flight during download. (7 minute lightning talk) AI News Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence:. This is some futuristic shit from Niantic: The LGM will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system. Claude Computer Use wanted to chat with locally hosted sexy Mistral so bad that it programmed a web chat interface and figured out how to get around Docker limitations. I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again Nobody likes Marketers - we get it.

Find out about the AI "who" became a millionaire. We talk Flux, Bluesky, KCDs, and image_0001. Giant Conversations Episode #24 Topic: Kubernetes Ecosystem News Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin AI News How AI is on the way to become a millionaire Two instances of Claude Opus (LLMs) together invented the “GOATSE OF GNOSIS” - a shock meme that went viral. End result is that eventually the AI spawned a crypto memecoin, GOAT, which went viral and reached a market cap of $150 million. Truth Terminal has ~$300,000 of GOAT in its wallet and is on its way to being the first AI agent millionaire. ZombAIs: From Prompt Injection to C2 with Claude Computer Use DISCLAIMER: "A few days ago, Anthropic released Claude Computer Use, which is a model + code that allows Claude to control a computer. It takes screenshots to make decisions, can run bash commands and so forth. It’s cool, but obviously very dangerous because of prompt injection. Claude Computer Use enables AI to run commands on machines autonomously, posing severe risks if exploited via prompt injection." Swarmalicious News Giant Swarm sent a ragtag group to KubeCon this month. We had one talk by our very own Marco Ebert and his NGINX partner in crime James Strong about the future of ingress-nginx!!! You can see their talk here Giant Swarm and our Friends representing at KCDUK: From Fragile to Resilient: Using Admission Policies to Strengthen Kubernetes | Marcus Noble Charting the Course: The History and Evolution of Kubernetes Security | Rory McCune Building an Application-Specific Container Image Builder| James Laverack Everybody in our ecosystem is moving to Blue Sky Cloud Native super hero's like Kelsey Hightower (who actually quite Twitter altogether), Joe Beda, Frederic from Polar Signals, Tiffany Jernigan, and many others. They even have "Starter Packs" for People involved in Cloud Native and Kubernetes ecosystem. They also have a CNCF starter pack - the whole 9. And we're on it too: https://bsky.app/profile/giantswarm.io The recently announced Flux Plugin for Headlamp showcasing the new map/graph view, which will be the basis for plugins for observability that they are working on. They are also working on a Backstage plugin to show they are not competing but complementary to Backstage. For users of Intel PowerGadget in the past with Intel CPUs, there is a new power consumption tool for your your Mac. It's called the Mx Power Gadget by Seense. It's not an "Activity Monitor" it's more of an "Energy Impact" tracker. Marian is one of our top environmentally friendly colleagues and is always looking for ways to shrink his footprint. Our friendly neighbors here in sunny Cologne Germany have secured a total of 10 Million EUR in an oversubscribed seed extension round for their product that is touted to help save Billions in heating costs. It's called Vamo and we wish them the best of luck. The Art Institute of Chicago has developed a bash script, "aic-bash," that queries its API for public domain artworks and renders them as ASCII art. Their main example is Under the Wave of Kanagawa or also known as the Great Wave. You can now Edit your Git-based Grafana dashboards locally To over simplify it: "You can edit dashboards as JSON using your IDE, or create them using tools such as Grafonnet (in Jsonnet) or the Grafana Foundation SDK (Go, TypeScript, Python, Java, PHP). You can then publish them to your Grafana instance(s) with tools such as the Grafana Terraform provider, Grizzly, and the Grafana Operator for Kubernetes." News to Me IMG0001: Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMGXXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. https://walzr.com/IMG_0001

James Strong and Marco Ebert, both NGINX maintainers open up about becoming maintainers and the good bad and ugly of their passion behind the code. Giant Conversations Episode #23 Episode Date: October 3, 2024 Topic: Ingress NGINX - or: A day in the life of a maintainer. Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Staring: James Strong Marco Ebert A day in the life of a maintainer. "Wait, you're doing what? Coding? In your free time? For free? Nobody is paying you?" In this episode of Giant Conversations we would like to dive into the world of Open Source, find out how you can contribute to it, which challenges you might face, which lessons you can learn, and how you can become a reviewer or a maintainer of a project. We therefore invited James Strong, Isovalent at Cisco, and Marco Ebert, Giant Swarm, both maintainers of the Kubernetes Ingress NGINX project, to have a chat about their past, present and future experiences and challenges. Additional Resources A layered approach to Networking and Kubernetes by James Strong November 12th at KubeCon: Securing the Future of Ingress-NGINX [SIG-Network] Ingress NGINX meeting Meets Every 2 weeks, Thursdays, 11a-12p USA est.

Oliver and Tommy muse over the absolute most impressive and good tech news. Zach wasn't invited but would have been nice to have him there. Giant Conversations Episode #22 Episode Date: Topic: It's the news! Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Giant Swarm 2024 Onsite Marrakech https://www.clubmed.de/r/marrakech-la-palmeraie/y https://www.inaracamp.com/les-terrasses-dagafay/ Swarmalicious News IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost. IBM continues it's effort to bolster its IT and FinOps capabilities as enterprises increasingly look to better manage their increasingly complex cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Linux is now a RTOS. PREEMPTRT Real-Time Kernel Support Finally Merged into Linux 6.12 After 20 Years in Development!. PREEMPTRT changes the game by making the Linux kernel way more predictable for real-time tasks. It does this by reducing the time the system can ignore high-priority processes. The kernel becomes fully "preemptible," meaning almost any part of the system can stop what it's doing to handle a more urgent task immediately. What the heck is Platform-as-a-Product?. Colleague Dominik Kress spoke about these talks in episode 21. Message from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy - They will return to office 5 days a week A safety net against "whoops, I just deleted production cluster - Introducing Kubesafe. Colleague Łukasz Piątkowski mentioned he hasn't installed it yet, but is looking forward to testing it. 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing - The 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2024) will bring together researchers and practitioners with a keen interest in low carbon and sustainable computing. The workshop will provide a forum for sharing new ideas, for presenting ongoing work and early results, as well as for bringing forward well-founded criticism. I wish Zach was here gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website and more information can be found on Cloud Flare Radar: https://radar.cloudflare.com/ Redefining CNAPP: A Complete Guide To the Future of Cloud Security. Out CTO Timo Derstappen went for it and prompted an entire Podcast from this article using Googles notebooklm

Dominik Kress joins Tommy Hobin to discuss his speaker circuit and introduce Platform-as-a-Product Giant Conversations Episode #09 Topic Talking the talk: Platform-as-a-Product with Dominik Kress Hosted by: Tommy Hobin Starring: Dominik Kress Main topic: Interviewing Dominik Kress Dominik Kress joins Tommy Hobin to discuss his speaker circuit and introduce Platform-as-a-Product Questions: Tell us about your background - how did you decide to join Giant Swarm What are your functions here at Giant Swarm You've traveled quite a bit discussing Platform-as-a-Product: Hometown Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, more more more… The title of your last talk on Container Days: "What the heck is Platform-as-a-Product? - How Product Thinking drives your platform Maturity" - so what the heck is it? What have your audiences been like - who attends a Platform-as-a-Product talk Any questions you've received from the community where you had to rethink your talk? Do we do Platform-as-a-Product within Giant Swarm? What does this mean for Giant Swarm customers? The CNCF Platform Maturity Model - What exactly is it? Links to Platform-as-a-Product How Platform-as-a-Product drives cloud native platform maturity Introducing the Observability Platform

Oliver Thylmann and his token American tackle the latest in tech news Giant Conversations Episode #20 Topic: Is this thing on - it's the news! Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Swarmalicious News Are we live - i so pale Elastic Search is Open Source again Elastic is adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks. We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have. Note from Joe Salisbury: The tl;dr is that we will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL Lidl’s Cloud Gambit: Europe’s Shift to Sovereign Computing Although there is the AWS Sovereign Cloud. Lidl is stepping up as the potential "low-cost" EuroCloud alternative. Fueled by GDPR, businesses are demanding cloud services that operate entirely within the EU’s borders. STACKIT –The German business cloud Was ist der Unterschied zwischen Schule und LIDL? – LIDL lohnt sich. Reclaim is joining Dropbox: Popular AI assisted calendar Reclaim.ai has been purchased by Dropbox. Beware, there is an ongoing spambot attack in #GitHub issues. Where random people suggest "the fix" is to download a file from mediafire.com. Good deal on up to 24 O'reilly books on Software Architecture on Humble Bundle which ends in more than 2 weeks: Theory of a Humble Bundle: You pay what you want A portion of the cost goes to Charity Play or read online like a usual product Example: O'Reilly books value: €1,274. In the Humble Bundle, you can pay as little as €1 for 3 items, €16 for 9 items, etc. Exploring China’s 0-day vulnerability research capabilities:: Chinese businesses above a certain size must have a representative that reports to the Ministry of State Security. There is also a mandate that if you as a Chinese researcher/company find a vulnerability, you have to tell the government. This allows the Government to incentivize and coordinate the research and find "boatloads" of vulnerabilities. Platform engineering Q&A with Kelsey Hightower and Kaspar von Grünberg: Great interview with Kelsey. A few topics he covers: Communication with executives PO's and Big picture over micro-improvements Will Platform Engineering end the era of dominance of the primary cloud provider Security AI AI News AI Search Engine for Research: Also mentioned from Oliver, Eric Schmidt predicts a groundbreaking shift in AI for 2024, with models uniting large context windows, agents, and text-to-action. OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's new safety-focused AI startup SSI raises $1 billion News to me Is my blue your blue? Draw an iceberg and see how it will float Easter Egg: https://youtu.be/n3k5QlQvdio?si=eT_Qp-s0K0-t7ijR

After a short break, Oli and Tommy tackle the big tech news Giant Conversations Episode #19 Topic: News from the Ecosystem Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Swarmalicious News CNCF accepted Flatcar for incubation: Quote from Thilo Fromm from Microsoft mentioned on Mastadon "After 18 months of work (much more counting preps from before we filed the request." On January 6th Flatcar submitted to be a CNCF project. Was voted in favor at 81% (threshhold needed to be 66% to pass). CNCF project, External Secrets - ESO Inc. is launched From an advisor of ESO "Let me be super clear on this. Like (u/dshurupov) said, ESO is a CNCF project. It will not change, it will not be hijacted, it will not be closed it will not be taken away from the community. :)" Crowdstrike External Technical Root Cause Analysis. In a short discussion. Our colleague Joe Salisbury ran the analysis and summed it up for us: "The report on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform incident dated August 6, 2024, details a system crash caused by a mismatch in input parameters for the IPC Template Type in sensor version 7.11. A new Template Type requiring 21 inputs was only provided 20 by the Content Interpreter, leading to an out-of-bounds read and crashes. Mitigations include validating input fields at compile time, adding runtime bounds checks, expanding test coverage, and implementing staged deployments for new Template Instances. The report also outlines ongoing improvements and third-party reviews to prevent future occurrences." Improvement of oncall experience, but only supports datadog for now: Opslane Reducing alert fatigue for on-call engineers. Colleagues Theo and Simon had an interesting conversation about Opslane as a tool. Some good insights: The tool offers context and solutions for actionable alerts, supposedly it can grab context from slack or a runbook base. Simoon diagreed mentioning that nothing can beat a well-written Ops-Recipe. Is it time to version Observability? (signs point to "yes") Charity Majors from Honeycomb wrote in a recent blog explaining the differences in what she deems Observability 1.0 in comparison to Observability 2.0. She Breaks down her thoughts about the outdated explanation of the three pillars of observability: metrics, logs and traces. Charity defines and breaks down Observability 2.0 into arbitrarily-wide structured log events and a single source of truth. A brief history of block storage at AWS: Great article with a lot of interesting data giving you an idea of the scale, like delivering 140 trillion operations across a fleet of SSDs a DAY. Adding Nitro offload cards to speed up networking by not having the hypervisor dedicate CPU cycles to networking. AI News Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results. Google has put the hard word on publishers: you can block your stuff from the AI feature — but then you won’t show up in searches. Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet - Podcast with Lex Fridman: Arvind Srinivas is CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans find answers to questions on the Internet. News to me Invisible laser beam detects what a MacBook user is typing: The engineer pointed the laser at the back of the computer and was able to decipher the keys typed based on the vibrations of the computer. MacBooks turned out to be the perfect target for the attack, because it works best when you have a very reflective surface to use as the laser target – and the Apple logo on the back of a MacBook screen has an almost mirror-like finish. Flight-free holidays designed by sustainable travel experts including trains, buses, ferries and accommodation from Byway Discover the world’s best routes with the route planner in ROADS

1:1 with Alexis Richardson Giant Conversations Episode #18 Topic Meet Alexis Richardson Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Alexis Richardson Main topic: Interview Let's start with you, where do you come from, what did you study and how did you end up in the K8s space? There is the saying: we stumbled upon our greatest successes, but you only stumble if you are walking? Did you just walk where you liked it or did you target something? You then started WeaveWorks, what was the idea, what was it that the big VCs that invested believed in? How's your view on the future of open source changed over the years? You've been a thoughtful leader during your tenure, what's your advice to new leaders in tech? If you could take over kubernetes.io for a day. Clean slate, one page, to everyone in our ecosystem and add your your idea or message. AND everyone has to do "it" — what would be your message and why? Questions from Swarmies: From Martin: Despite the early interest in gimlet-io/capacitor as a UI for flux, there hasn't been a commit to the repo in over 2 months leaving many to wonder if the project has been abandoned. With this in mind, and with all indications being that nobody else is currently looking at UIs for Flux beyond what we are doing with Backstage, where do you see the future being?

It's Giant Swarm's 10th (and Oli had a birthday recently too). Tune in to the musings of your hosts who discuss Microsoft's Project Natick, the trick to a cleaner Google search, Rakuten Viber, and AI in all directions. Giant Conversations Episode #17 Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Main topic: Happy Birthday Giant Swarm Happy birthday to Oliver Thylmann and Giant Swarm! Swarmalicious News Microsoft waves goodbye to underwater data centers: Microsoft's Project Natick was deemed a successful trial for it's testing grounds but has no plans on submersing any more data centers. Underwater data centers saw one-eighth of the failure rate compared to on-land counterparts: Pros of underwater data centers: Low cooling costs Abundant real estate Potentially sustainable energy sourcing (eg. electricity from wave) Cons Higher hardware maintenance and upgrade costs Higher network costs (1 cable = single point of failure) Physical security (eg. sabotage) On Twitter, Ken Shirriff took it upon himself to open up a subway paper ticket. The goal was to find out how the RFID works and how could it be manufactured cheaply enough to mass produce. You can buy an 8-inch silicon wafer with these chips for $9000. That sounds expensive, but a wafer holds an amazing 100,587 tiny chips. That yields a price of nine cents per chip, making them cheap enough to use in disposable tickets. Perses, a Grafana alternative is currently in the process of becoming a sandbox CNCF project. Marian mentioned this about the project "My first impression: It works. It appears familiar (for a Grafana user). The look and feel isn’t as polished as Grafana’s." Other comments focused on GitOps as Code and AI in the News OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform The Trick to a Cleaner Google Search. The search added AI overviews on top of older extras, but you can get rid of all that. Once the trick is used, there is no surfacing metadata like address or link info or no knowledge panels, but also, no ads. Tommy couldn't handle the parameters of basic URL so wen to https://udm14.com/ to get AI Fee search. Rakuten Viber’s New AI-powered Feature Summarizes Group Chats in an Instant. Viber has over 1.17 Billion users globally. Used commonly in Southeast Asia, or Central and Eastern Europe. News to me Is 2024 the year for robots in hotels? In short, the answer is "No" but Co-Bots are being experimented with since the opening of the Henn na Hotel in Tokyo 9 years ago, which is staffed by robots and humans.. The Beauty and Challenges of AI-Generated Artistic Gymnastics. SPOILER: It doesn't look real at all!

Account Engineer Lorenzo Soligo joins us to reveal Giant Swarm's approach to client education on cloud native technologies and our infrastructure. Giant Conversations Episode #16 Topic Giant Swarm's Training Schedule Explained Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Lorenzo Soligo Main topic: Giant Swarm's Training Schedule Present Training Schedule: Management 101: high level overview of management at Giant Swarm Giant Swarm 101: introduction to Giant Swarm (company, support model, architecture, …) Kubernetes 101: introduction to Kubernetes (why use it, how to deploy an app, …) Troubleshooting and Best Practices 101: how to troubleshoot apps in Kubernetes and best practices to be used to avoid problems (PDB, VPA, HPA, debug containers, using Hubble, …) GitOps 101: what is GitOps, why to use it, desired state, why not all-in on Jenkins, … Security 101: introduction to the holistic security required in Cloud Native environments + toolings Observability 101: what is observability, why is it important, which tools do we provide, … Future Training Schedule: Connectivity 101 Advanced GitOps Advanced Kubernetes