iyclo

 Posted on August 5, 2021  |  4 minutes  |  664 words

In a past gig, I was tasked to evaluate container schedulers. The usual suspects Kubernetes and Nomad were the contenders. One huge caveat with the whole exercise is that containers are being scheduled within AWS. You have EKS and ECS but can’t move it to on-premises infrastructure in case an inexplicable reason comes up. Looking closely at these schedulers, they are designed for bare-metal fleets. If you have servers across multiple data centers, like a CDN, then Kubernetes is the best out there. [Read More]
iyclo  containers  devops  solutions 

CryptoHack

 Posted on July 28, 2021  |  2 minutes  |  410 words

This week I have been solving the challenges at cryptohack.org. The past three days were a blast. Bit fiddling, hex buckling adventure. Did my last CTF more than a decade ago. There’s a mix of math, coding, and brain teasers. The challenges are grouped in the following categories. General Mathematics Block Ciphers RSA Diffie-Hellman Elliptic Curves Miscellaneous Crypto on the Web I’m bad at math so most of my points are from the problems that required coding and brain teasers. [Read More]
cryptography  ctf 

A Kind Demo

 Posted on July 24, 2021  |  4 minutes  |  713 words

Most of the DevOps interview assignments involving Kubernetes suggest using minikube. I believe the intent is to gauge a basic understanding of containers and related DevOps tasks. I have skills far from a Kubernetes expert but I hope the interviewing team won’t mind if we do a bit of experimenting. Looking around, I see there are more options for local Kubernetes clusters. I find the kind project a very promising contender. [Read More]
demo  devops  containers  go 

Testing Strategy

 Posted on June 7, 2021  |  7 minutes  |  1440 words

A testing strategy that applies to a wide range of software from ToDo to DeFi apps. What’s that like? Here’s my take on this turbulent topic. In software, engineers are not engineers by trade. Definitions are mostly made up. Some are luckily agreed upon. A popular software engineer can redefine terms as they see fit and turn public perspective. What I call functional might be integration in someone’s vocabulary. Hopefully, the supporting text might clarify a particular perspective. [Read More]
SRE  devops  programming 

File Sharing

 Posted on March 23, 2021  |  4 minutes  |  775 words

So you want to send an email with a confidential attachment. Maybe you just want some privacy. It is reasonable and should be easy. Yes, modern messaging platforms exist but email is so sturdy because of its ubiquity and federated nature. The Internet standards for email encryption are PGP and S/MIME but no one seems to use them. Properly using PGP or S/MIME requires senders and recipients to be configured to use either. [Read More]
solutions 

FortiGate x SonicWall

 Posted on February 18, 2021  |  6 minutes  |  1267 words

This comparison of network equipment was commissioned by a client. I am evaluating Fortinet and SonicWall products. No practical testing was done. This will be a factual objective comparison using publicly available information. Hopefully, the reader will integrate my findings with their own evaluation criteria. The first impression from my client’s demo experience is that Fortigate had the best coordination and quickest turnaround. SonicWall had some difficulty and delays but eventually delivered a working demo. [Read More]
networking  juxtapose