Rich Burroughs:

When you hear the phrase “cloud native,” is Kubernetes the first thing that comes to your mind? It is for me, and I expect I’m not alone. Kubernetes is now the second-largest open source project after Linux, and it’s the big fish in the cloud native pond. But there are many other projects in the CNCF landscape and the broader cloud native community.

So, I thought I’d list some cloud native tools that can be very useful for teams that aren’t using Kubernetes or aren’t using it for every workload. Here are 7 of them that I like a lot.

If Rich’s name rings a bell, that’s because he was just on Ship It! last week. 😉

One of the things we discussed with Paul Copplestone from Supabase was what, exactly, might a cloud native Postgres look like? Well, perhaps it will look like OrioleDB:

A new storage engine for PostgreSQL, bringing a modern approach to database capacity, capabilities and performance to the world’s most-loved database platform.

OrioleDB consists of an extension, building on the innovative table access method framework and other standard Postgres extension interfaces. By extending and enhancing the current table access methods, OrioleDB opens the door to a future of more powerful storage models that are optimized for cloud and modern hardware architectures.

I came across an interesting use case for edge compute the other day: cookie management at the edge. It probably won’t be super relevant to a ton of people, but it’s an interesting use case I wanted to share, nonetheless.

Garage is a distributed storage solution, that automatically replicates your data on several servers. Garage takes into account the geographical location of servers, and ensures that copies of your data are located at different locations when possible for maximal redundancy, a unique feature in the landscape of distributed storage systems.

It has an S3-compatible API and can be used as a storage backend for things like NextCloud, Matrix, and Mastodon. It’s being built by a non-profit in France that is “working to promote self-hosting and small-scale hosting.” Why do they do this?

self-hosting means running our own hardware at home, and providing 24/7 Internet services from there. We have many reasons for doing this. One is because this is the only way we can truly control who has access to our data. Another one is that it helps us be aware of the physical substrate of which the Internet is made: making the Internet run has an environmental cost which we want to evaluate and keep under control. The physical hardware also gives us a sense of community, calling to mind all of the people that could currently be connected and making use of our services, and reminding us of the purpose for which we are doing this.

They brand CasaOS as an operating system, but it’s really a layer on top of Linux that provides a nice UI and easy app (docker container) installation. It’s early days for the project, but we definitely need some open source options in this space, so here’s hoping they continue to progress!

Welcome to Song Encoder, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features Pwnie Award-winning songwriter Forrest Brazeal.

Troy Hunt (of Have I been Pwned fame) has been a vocal proponent of cloud-first services for awhile. Last December, that strategy came back to bite him:

It all started with my monthly Azure bill for December which was way over what it would normally be. It only took a moment to find the problem…

He goes on to tell the tale in excruciating detail. Be careful out there, cloud natives.

Cloudflare has a lot more to offer than merely DDoS protection and CDN services. On this episode, Jon Kuperman joins Amal & Jerod to talk through many of their cool new things like Workers, KV, Durable Objects, and R2 Storage. Thanks to listener Matt Mannucci for requesting this episode!

If the datacenter is the computer, then the cloud is its operating system — so let’s start treating it like one and stop micro-managing thousands of individual ones.

Shawn (swyx) Wang lays out Cloudflare’s strategy to disrupt the cloud from the outside in:

While the tech industry is used to come-from-below disruption, and the software industry is increasingly grasping class-for-the-masses atomic concepts, I believe Cloudflare is writing a new playbook that is the little-guy counterpart of the embrace, extend, extinguish model used by Microsoft.

This week Emile Vauge, founder & CEO of Traefik, joins Gerhard to share a story that started as a solution to a 2000 microservices challenge, the real-world implications of shipping many times a day for years, and the difficulties of sustaining an inclusive and healthy open-source community while building a product company.

Working every day on keeping the open-source community in sync with the core team was an important lesson. The second learning was around big changes between major versions.

The journey from Travis CI to Circle CI, then to Semaphore CI and eventually GitHub Actions is an interesting one. The automation tools inspired by the Mymirca ant colony is a fascinating idea, executed well. There is more to discover in the episode.

On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is “non-existent.”

After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com.

On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we’re all coding in the cloud.

This is an article about exploring Inlets, a cloud native tunnel, with various use cases (including the Apple Silicon RC version of inlets-pro) in my home lab along with its surrounding open source ecosystem. Also some tips about using inlets-operator and MetalLB at the same time, and what could be done in a Kubernetes cluster.

In this episode, Gerhard follows up on The Changelog #375, which is the last time that he spoke Crossplane with Dan and Jared. Many things changed since then, such as abstractions and compositions, as well as using Crossplane to build platforms, which were mostly ideas.

Fast forward 18 months, 2k changes, as well as a major version, and Crossplane is now an easy choice - some would say the best choice - for platform teams to declare what infrastructure means to them. You can now use Crossplane to define your infrastructure abstractions across multiple vendors, including AWS, GCP & Equinix Metal. The crazy ideas from 2019 are now bold and within reach. Gerhard also has an idea for the changelog.com 2022 setup. Listen to what Jared & Dan think, and then let us know your thoughts too.

Spending the time and effort to consider what happens after your cloud credits run out, including how much storage you’ll need to scale and how you plan to manage your data, pays off in the long run. Every developer wants their project to succeed.

So, how do you plan for survival and success when your free credits run out?

In 1984 John Gage of Sun Microsystems was credited as saying “The Network is the computer.” Almost four decades ago, John had a vision of distributed systems working together to be greater than the sum of their parts.

For this article, I surveyed the land of hosted IDEs and it turns out that we’ve progressed beyond running VS Code on an iPad whilst sipping a cocktail.

You can still do that, but there’s way more to it today and I’ll take you through some of use-cases and add my own thoughts. There’s also a practical guide at the end to get started with the open source VS Code browser by Coder.

This week Adam is joined by Mitch Wainer, previously CMO at DigitalOcean and a member of the founding team. They talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and marketer, the early days at DigitalOcean, and everything that went into disrupting the cloud with blazing fast SSDs. Back in March (2021), DigitalOcean started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — this obviously earned Mitch and many others a very large payday. They also talk about the work Mitch is doing now with Welcome and Sponsored.

Porter brings the Heroku experience to your own AWS/GCP account, while upgrading your infrastructure to Kubernetes. Get started on Porter without the overhead of DevOps and customize your infrastructure later when you need to.

For more on Porter, tune in to Go Time live on June 1st! Mat Ryer will be asking Carolyn Van Slyck all about it. If live isn’t an option… subscribe to Go Time, why don’t ya?

Namespace conflict! I mistook this Porter for that Porter which Carolyn Van Slyck works on. That Porter will be the subject of the June 1st Go Time, not this Porter. If you want us to do a show on this Porter, let us know. 😎

Marcel Klehr:

Remember Xmarks? It was great. Floccus does the same thing and even allows you to sync with whatever server you want: any Google Drive, any Nextcloud, any WebDAV server. With more backends in the works.

Floccus has extensions for Chrome (and its derivatives), Firefox, and Edge browsers.

Authelia is an open-source authentication and authorization server providing 2-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) for your applications via a web portal. It acts as a companion of reverse proxies like nginx, Traefik or HAProxy to let them know whether queries should pass through. Unauthenticated users are redirected to Authelia Sign-in portal instead.

Raj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world’s most popular open source technology used to compose observability dashboards (we use Grafana here at Changelog). Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source. They have this “big tent” open source ecosystem philosophy that’s driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But, to understand the wisdom Raj is leading with today, we have to go back to where things got started. To do that we had to go back like Prince to 1999…

We’re talking with Gerhard Lazu, our resident SRE, ops, and infrastructure expert about the evolution of Changelog’s infrastructure, what’s new in 2020, and what we’re planning for in 2021. The most notable change? We’re now running on Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE)! We even test the resilience of this new infrastructure by purposefully taking the site down. That’s near the end, so don’t miss it!

Thanks to Alex Williams over at The New Stack for doing a great write up remembering Dan Kohn and the tremendous mark he has left on open source and Cloud Native. Of course Dan had help along the way, but by-and-large the CNCF and “cloud native” as we know it are the direct result of Dan’s vision and leadership.

Thank you Dan. You will be missed.

We knew little in 2016 about what Dan was up to but we soon got a hint. The CNCF was already established but what it represented was still a bit unclear. If anything, Dan was a businessman and a computer scientist. He knew the economic importance of at-scale computing and the technical complexity that made it so fascinating.

The technical community was ready for someone like Dan — they needed help. Open source cloud native projects were growing but the resources were essential to keep progress moving. He was there to make sure the work got done that technologists should not have to do: Building awareness, supporting the publicity of new projects and perhaps most of all, smoothly running the conferences.

We’ve had Dan on The Changelog a few times. Go back and listen to episode #276 and episode #314 to hear from Dan himself about the journey of the CNCF and Cloud Native.

What is cloud native? In this episode Johnny and Aaron explain it to Mat and Jon. They then dive into questions like, “What problems does this solve?” and “Why was Go such a good fit for this space?”

Infracost shows hourly and monthly cost estimates for a Terraform project. This helps developers, DevOps et al. quickly see the cost breakdown and compare different deployment options upfront.