I always like seeing what themes emerge from the week’s content. This week several posts on networking, query languages and the similarities and differences (in approach and provided services) between the major cloud providers.

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News

eBPF aims to make the Linux kernel programmable, without the need to load kernel modules or compile custom kernels. This new site is a great introduction and links to several interesting projects utilising eBPF.
https://ebpf.io/

A post both on OSPF datacenter-scale networking, and on the risks of silos when choosing technology.
https://medium.com/the-elegant-network/what-ive-learned-about-scaling-ospf-in-datacenters-7100c33ce63c

Cortex and Thanos are two projects which help scale Prometheus. This post covers some of the background and collaboration between the projects.
https://grafana.com/blog/2020/07/16/how-the-cortex-and-thanos-projects-collaborate-to-make-scaling-prometheus-better-for-all/

The differences in approach between the major clouds are interesting to consider, especially if you’re most familiar with one of them. This post looks at various network routing and load balancing options.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/08/09/Service-Fabric-News

I’ve always liked OpenResty, which is an Nginx variant with built-in support for Lua scripting. This post is a nice introduction and a good example of dynamic configuration.
https://kura.gg/2020/08/09/retrying-dynamically-configured-upstreams-with-openresty/

Nearly everyone will have used SQL for some database work at some point. This post takes a critical look at the language and points out some issues, and proposes some improvements.
https://edgedb.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql/

Another post on a query language. PromQL, from Prometheus, is increasingly used in other tools. In the absence of a proper specification, some efforts are underway to provide a correctness testing tool.
https://promlabs.com/blog/2020/08/06/comparing-promql-correctness-across-vendors

I like finding relevant research topics for this newsletter, for the points made in this article about the relevance of research to IT practitioners. Some good pointers to recent security, privacy and cloud research topics.
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2020/8/security-privacy-cloud-research

Tools

Fregot is a powerful repl for working with Rego, the Open Policy Agent policy language. It provides useful error messages and testing tools for iterating on policies.
https://github.com/fugue/fregot

READMEs and documentation are not part of container images (unfortunately), but registries typically support documentation against repositories. This tool helps with synchronisation content for Docker Hub, Quay and Harbor registries.
https://github.com/christian-korneck/docker-pushrm

Both AWS and Azure have lots of overlapping services, but if you know one but are using the other how can you navigate the large service catalog? A2a provides a simple tool to help. GCP support planned too.
https://github.com/kshitijcode/a2a