Just back home from Austin after a great KubeCon. I have lots of content from the conference that will have to wait until next week unfortunately, but we still have a collection of posts on the role of the sysadmin, trust in hardware and data from the last year on serverless and container orchestration adoption.

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News

A great post from this years sysadvent about the evolving role of the sysadmin; why many things like microservices or containers are more similar to existing sysadmin tools than they appear.
https://sysadvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/day-6-sysadmins-evolution-of-role.html

A detailed look at moving a core component of a large architecture, in this case moving a job queue away from a Redis based solution to Kafka. Useful diagrams and detail for decisions taken and the rollout.
https://slack.engineering/scaling-slacks-job-queue-687222e9d100

A solid post arguing that we as a community often put too much faith in hardware isolation or security features in hypervisors, but the reality on the ground doesn’t really warrant it.
https://www.cloudatomiclab.com/hardware/

A good post on the importance of empathy when comparing different tools and what people do with them, looking at criticisms of Docker and how to address them.
https://jpetazzo.github.io/2017/10/31/devops-docker-empathy/

I’m pretty keen on the concept of establishing a set of shared design principles when building software or services. This post has a number of examples, but I’d love to see more talk of design principles for operations.
https://principles.design/

Some interesting data on the adoption of container orchestration tools over the past year, including a look at Kubernetes adoption, ECS adoption and what scheduler adoption does to host usage.
https://www.datadoghq.com/container-orchestration/

More data analysis, this time on the state of serverless functions on AWS lambda. Information on language usage, geographical distribution, size of functions and more.
https://blog.newrelic.com/2017/11/21/aws-lambda-state-of-serverless/

Tools

Escape is a toolset for release engineering, life-cycle management and continuous delivery of software platforms and artefacts. Unlike some similar tools it hands off much of the work to other lower-level platforms or command line tools and focuses on the integration piece.
https://github.com/ankyra/escape/
https://escape.ankyra.io/docs/what-is-escape/

Metaparticle is a new project aiming to be the standard library for distributed systems. It takes advantage of the capabilities of Kubernetes to expose features like master election and container packaging and scale out, with current implementations in .NET, Java and Javascript.
https://metaparticle.io/posts/welcome-to-metaparticle/
https://metaparticle.io/

SockGuard is a eat new project which provides a proxy to the Docker socket which exposes some useful access control features.
https://github.com/buildkite/sockguard

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