User space isn't slow

In-kernel networking solutions, such as WireGuard, are not always faster than user space.

September 10, 2023 · 3 min

An optimal CI/CD system

Exploring an (unfortunately, hypothetical) CI/CD system for end to end tests on Kubernetes.

September 6, 2023 · 6 min

Istio Ambient is not a "Node Proxy"

The common messaging around Istio Ambient Mesh is that is a "node proxy." For example, from The New Stack ... architecture that moves the proxy functionality from the pod-level to the node-level. While this is technically accurate, it is misleading and really missing the point and benefits of Ambient. A brief history of service mesh architectures This skips quite a bit of information, but is close enough. One of the earlier service meshes on the market was Linkerd 1 - not to be confused with Linkerd 2, which most people just call "Linkerd" today....

August 22, 2023 · 3 min

Waypoint Proxies The Hard Way

How to achieve an architecture similar to "Waypoint Proxies" without ambient mesh, or even Istio.

August 22, 2023 · 11 min

Building a lot of docker images

Fully utilizing buildkit's potentional

August 4, 2023 · 5 min

GOMAXPROCS and GOMEMLIMIT in Kubernetes

How and why to easily these fields

July 31, 2023 · 2 min

Saying No In Open Source

As an open source maintainer, I am reviewing roughly 25 ideas per day - whether they are feature requests, design proposals, or pull requests. Inevitably, this leads to saying "No" quite a bit as well. Usually, this is in a softer for like "No, not right now", "No, not in its current form", or "No, unless someone else approves", but the outcome is the same: the change is not accepted, and the emotional impact on the reviewer and contributor is similar....

July 27, 2023 · 5 min

Useful tools for Kubernetes

Most people using Kubernetes extensive have already defined alias k=kubectl and are using tools like kubectx. As someone really lazy though, I have found/developed a few less common tools to help work with Kubernetes efficiently. kubectl apply from clipboard This relies on zsh, and uses the zle to define a custom command. function zle_apply { LBUFFER=" cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f - $(xclip -se c -o) EOF" CURSOR=31 } zle -N zle_apply; bindkey "^k" zle_apply This defines a function and binds it to Ctrl+k....

July 12, 2023 · 3 min

Tracing shell scripts with OpenTelemetry

A little bit of OpenTelemetry, a lot of shell hackery

July 11, 2023 · 6 min

Zero allocations metrics with opentelemetry-go

In the past, Istio has suffered from performance issues from OpenCensus, which was used for metrics reporting. At extremes, we saw up to 20% of CPU spent just on incrementing various metrics. This was mitigated to some extent by batching metrics updates, optimizing OpenCensus itself, and caching parts of our OpenCensus usage. At best, we got down to roughly 600ns and 3 allocations per metric update. As OpenCensus is now deprecated, I have been looking into migration to OpenTelemetry - and hoping to avoid these issues this time around....

July 11, 2023 · 2 min