What’s New?
Bridge to Kubernetes
Though Kubernetes makes a lot of things easier, some things that it has made harder is testing out changes and debugging live in a staging environment, or setting up application dependencies and databases on a developer laptop. No one wants to have to set up and run 20 different microservices and databases just to start developing on their local computer.
Microsoft has recently developed a tool called “Bridge to Kubernetes” which lets you route traffic from a staging Kubernetes cluster to your local dev environment (and route traffic from your dev environment back to Kubernetes). This lets you run a local application on your laptop as if it is part of your Kubernetes cluster. This setup has several notable advantages over a normal VPN. Specifically, requests from other services to your application will be routed to your laptop to debug locally (making it easier to debug issues with multiple microservices).
Though it’s still in its early stages, “Bridge to Kubernetes” can be used with any Kubernetes cluster (and not just those on Azure Kubernetes Service). It’s a great tool for debugging issues in a real, working environment. If this sounds like something that would improve your workflow, let us know and we’ll share our guide on how to start developing directly on Kubernetes.
Managing Your Data on S3
S3 has a number of extra-features that can save you money, improve redundancy, or increase bucket security in a big way:
You can set lifecycle policies to delete or move data to a cheaper storage class after a certain amount of time.
Enabling bucket versioning lets you not only keep multiple versions of a file in the same bucket, but also recover deleted objects.
S3 has compliance policies to enforce that objects are stored encrypted-at-rest and use encryption-in-transit.
Every use case is different, but if one or more of these options looks valuable to your company, we can help you set it up.
Useful Reading
Postgres 13 has been released! You can read more about the new features in Postgres 13 here.
View information about internet trends (DDoS traffic, IPv6 adoption, TLS 1.3 uptake, etc.) on Cloudflare’s new “Radar” dashboard: https://radar.cloudflare.com/
AWS announces the IO2 storage type.
Run virtual machines on Kubernetes: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/09/07/virtual-machines-in-a-kubernetes-world/
Fun Stuff
Do you need to convince guests or small children that you’re secretly a hacker? Look no further: eDEX-UI is a terminal emulator that gives you a functional terminal in a pointlessly complex sci-fi window (watch the demo video for full effect).
Play your Windows games on Linux with DXVK: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk. DXVK lets Linux desktops run Windows games that require DirectX. Just install Wine, install DXVK, and install your game using Wine (alternatively, you can launch Windows games on Linux through Steam using Proton). Is it finally time to delete your Windows gaming PC and use Linux instead? (We know you secretly want to.)