GC - #19 We're Baaack!

Show notes

Giant Conversations Episode #19

Topic: News from the Ecosystem

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Swarmalicious News

CNCF accepted Flatcar for incubation: Quote from Thilo Fromm from Microsoft mentioned on Mastadon "After 18 months of work (much more counting preps from before we filed the request." On January 6th Flatcar submitted to be a CNCF project. Was voted in favor at 81% (threshhold needed to be 66% to pass).

CNCF project, External Secrets - ESO Inc. is launched From an advisor of ESO "Let me be super clear on this. Like (u/dshurupov) said, ESO is a CNCF project. It will not change, it will not be hijacted, it will not be closed it will not be taken away from the community. :)"

Crowdstrike External Technical Root Cause Analysis. In a short discussion. Our colleague Joe Salisbury ran the analysis and summed it up for us: "The report on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform incident dated August 6, 2024, details a system crash caused by a mismatch in input parameters for the IPC Template Type in sensor version 7.11. A new Template Type requiring 21 inputs was only provided 20 by the Content Interpreter, leading to an out-of-bounds read and crashes. Mitigations include validating input fields at compile time, adding runtime bounds checks, expanding test coverage, and implementing staged deployments for new Template Instances. The report also outlines ongoing improvements and third-party reviews to prevent future occurrences."

Improvement of oncall experience, but only supports datadog for now: Opslane Reducing alert fatigue for on-call engineers. Colleagues Theo and Simon had an interesting conversation about Opslane as a tool. Some good insights: The tool offers context and solutions for actionable alerts, supposedly it can grab context from slack or a runbook base. Simoon diagreed mentioning that nothing can beat a well-written Ops-Recipe.

Is it time to version Observability? (signs point to "yes") Charity Majors from Honeycomb wrote in a recent blog explaining the differences in what she deems Observability 1.0 in comparison to Observability 2.0. She Breaks down her thoughts about the outdated explanation of the three pillars of observability: metrics, logs and traces. Charity defines and breaks down Observability 2.0 into arbitrarily-wide structured log events and a single source of truth.

A brief history of block storage at AWS: Great article with a lot of interesting data giving you an idea of the scale, like delivering 140 trillion operations across a fleet of SSDs a DAY. Adding Nitro offload cards to speed up networking by not having the hypervisor dedicate CPU cycles to networking.

AI News

Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results. Google has put the hard word on publishers: you can block your stuff from the AI feature — but then you won’t show up in searches.

Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet - Podcast with Lex Fridman: Arvind Srinivas is CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans find answers to questions on the Internet.

News to me

Invisible laser beam detects what a MacBook user is typing: The engineer pointed the laser at the back of the computer and was able to decipher the keys typed based on the vibrations of the computer. MacBooks turned out to be the perfect target for the attack, because it works best when you have a very reflective surface to use as the laser target – and the Apple logo on the back of a MacBook screen has an almost mirror-like finish.

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