Recently I had a nice discussion on a forum on Kubernetes, for me the topic was crystal clear since the first time I used it and understood a little bit about it, but sometimes this discussion repeats on the web, so I decided to save here my thoughts on this, so I can copy and paste it in the future to save some time…

I have to be honest, my experience with K8s always been the 2nd image…

When I first came in contact with K8s my first impression was: “this is a fantastic tool to solve a problem… that almost nobody has”.

Now after two years working as a sysadmin in a company extremely involved in K8s, where I learned, teached, installed, configured, fixed countless K8s cluster my conclusion is: “this is a fantastic tool to solve a problem… that almost nobody has”.

At the end of the day, despite all the buzzwords the main reason to use K8s is scalability, horizontal scalability, there are no other advantages.

Some people thinks the main advantage is the declarative approach to infrastructure, but I disagree; first of all K8s does not force you to use a declarative approach, you can do everything with an imperative approach (kubect create bla bla bla… instead of using manifests).
On the other hand also docker (with docker-compose) can do the same, so why use a more complex tool (K8s, which is much more complex) to get the same result?

No K8s approach, its objects, its object relations everything is built with one purpose: scalability.

But honestly who cares about scalability?

If you’re a Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft of Google obviously it’s important and necessary.
If you’re a big campus lab with thousands of services or the Cern datacenter or other examples like that it’s important and almost necessary.

But even if you’re a big company honestly nobody gives a damn about scalability from a technical point of view.

Ok HA is important, maybe distribute load on a couple of nodes makes things easier for maintenance, but in most of the case if you plan a good maintenance window and announce it correctly to your users nobody cares.

On top of that scalability works well with stateless applications, but in reality in my experience (25 years in the IT industry) stateless applications are the exception, the vast majority of applications are stateful, so it’s not that simple to scale up and make everything work ok, you have to deal with a lot of details (persistent data, sticky sessions, concurrency and so on…).

So what’s the end result in so many companies?

K8s cluster everywhere (in a lot of case single node “clusters”) requested by some manager who don’t understand a thing about them, installed by some consultant company, completely abandoned and managed by nobody, with a couple of applications made with statefulsets or deployments with only one replica.

Logging management is a pain in the a$$, backups are a paint in the a$$, and everybody hopes it will run forever because nobody in the company knows how to deal with problems, exceptions, certificates expirations and so on…

The very opposite of the basic principle that should be applied in the IT, the KISS principle.

I just finished my first long ride on my bike (~ 2000 Km in 4 days) after 3 years of riding and more than 42k Km on the bike.

This was my fist group ride, until now I done all the 42k Km on my bike as solo rider.

It was a blast, I really enjoyed it but I also made mistakes and learned a lot, here’s some suggestions I can give as a newbye:

Don’t underestimate the “emulation effect” of the group.

Riding with people with more experience or more powerful bikes than you means that you’ll always try to keep the pace and ride like them: DON’T DO IT.
Keep your pace, ride at your speed, nowadays everyone has a phone which can work as a GPS navigator, maybe you’ll arrive later, that’s fine, but don’t underestimate the danger of riding at other people speed or pace.

Riding comfort matters.

Riding is hard for your body, don’t feel ashamed to stop to make you butt rest or to drink some water.

Long rides are like marathons, completing them is already like winning them.

Consider riding underpants (like these https://www.revitsport.com/us_en/motorcycle-pants-airborne-2-black ) and a comfort seat, usually riding gear is not comfortable and will scratch you skin after hours of riding, those underpants prevent this and will help with sweat.

A mistake I did was using underwear like this and the last days they caused me a huge pain on the edges because of rubber bands, small details like that can make a huge difference between a comfortable and fun ride and a constant pain in the ass (literally).

Take it easy, take your time

Don’t let the trip consist only in riding riding and again riding, otherwise you’ll end up exhausted.

If you found a stunning panoramic view stop and enjoy it, this will help your mind and your body.

If you want to take a photo stop and do it, remember: it’s not a race, it’s an holiday.

Start early, end early.

Usually I hate to get up early in the morning, but in a riding trip it’s the best solution.

Riding when you’re exhausted is too dangerous, you’ll risk mistakes that can be fatal; also consider that, as I said, riding is hard for your body, you’ll see very soon that even if you to sleep early (early than your usual habits) you’ll fall asleep in no time.

Get a good H2O protection gear.

Riding wet is an awful experience, that may seem obvious but it still true.

Get an helmet with pinlock

Ride early in a chilly morning or under the rain may cause your visor to get foggy.

Buy a helmet with a pinlock ready visor, and mount the pinlock, it’s the cheapest and most effective way to prevent this problem, it will make a huge difference, believe me.

Stop when you don’t enjoy riding anymore.

After hours and hours of riding is perfectly normal to not feel the ride enjoyable, that’s the moment you have to stop, take a break or find a place to rest, don’t force you to reach your goal for the day.

For the series “Thing I can’t live without” (or maybe “dear stupid mega corporate, this is how you should make your software setup”) I would like to suggest NVCleaninstall.

I have to admit I’m an Nvidia hater since the good old 3dfx days, but sometimes it happens to install of update drivers on other people’s computer that sadly use Nvidia GPUs.

NVCleaninstall is the only way to install or update Nvidia GPU drivers without installing bloatware and useless services, it’s simple to use, it’s clean and straightforward and can automatically check when new drivers are release, it’s a small gem every Nvidia user should know and use.

You’re welcome.

Just a quick tip to remind myself how to properly commit some data that needs to be encrypted with git-crypt.

First of all, if you need to change files pattern or paths of the data you need to encrypt you have to change your .gitattributes file:

1. git clone the encrypted repo
2. modify .gitattributes
3. git add & git commit
4. git push

In case you only have to change encrypted files or add new encrypted files

1. git clone the encrypted repo
2. unlock it with “git-crypt unlock <key path>”
3. verify files are not crypted with “git-crypt status ; file <encrypted files path>”.
   If they’re shown as “data” it means they’re still encrypted (unless they’re binary data by themself)
4. add/change files
5. git add & git commit
6. git-crypt lock
7. verify files are encrypted before pushing repo with “git-crypt status ; file <encrypted files path>”
8. git push

After all this you can blame yourself for turning one more simple thing into a hard one.

It looks like a century has passed since I wrote something about this game… in fact it was 2022 and I was writing about the problems affecting the game.

Well none of that has been solved, and probably more problems have been added… but that’s the last important of the bad news.

The main problem the game is facing is that something terrible we saw coming for years is happening, the game is basically split into two big factions fighting each other, or better not fighting each other and living in some sort of “cold war stalemate”.

On one side we have the Imperium and allies, basically the Goonswarm and friends.

It’s a huge community with a great organization, good fleet commanders and with any opportunity for any player to do whatever they want, no matter they are experienced bitter veterans or fresh newbies.

In its recent history Imperium removed any kind of system renting (basically small entities pays a fee to use a system for farming and their own things, just like a victim of some sort of mafia boss, if they don’t pay they have to leave or get crushed), made its space free for all its members and call a war against botting (the use of illegal bots to farm).

On the other side we have a larger organization called Pandafam, made by the chinese alliance Fraternity, Pandemic Legion, Pandemic Horde and North Coalition.

This huge collection of alliances have almost anything inside:

• chinese alliances that costantly violates the game rules and licenses promoting bots and RMT (Real Money Trading, selling or buying game goods with real money, which is strictly prohibited but the game owner CCP) and living on renting.
• veteran alliances like Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition made by a bunch of people but ruling like mafia bosses thanks to space renting
• a melting pot of everything (newbies, spies, whoever else dislike Imperim for no reasons) called Pandemic Horde.

This mix of everything is founded (and funded) mostly on renting and illegal operations (bots and RMT) and usually deny any content (which means pvp fight) they are not 100% sure to win, they use timezone tanking (putting their structure’s vulnerability timers in chinese timezone in a way that it’s almost impossible to contest them), and recently they started to reinforce their own structures to put next timers also in chinese timezone (preventing enemies to set those timers in US or EU timezone, denying pvp content).

In short words they are killing the game.

You may think I’m clearly on Impierium side and against Pandafam, take a loot yourself on how vast is Pandafam space compared to Imperium and its allies.

In general Imperium+allies and Pandafam have similar player numbers, but look how huge is Pandafam space compared to Imperium one.

Why? The answer is simple: renting.

All those regions highlighted in purple are almost entirely dedicated to renting, the less attractive systems (systems with low resources) are empty resulting in a huge waste of systems, all the others are rented to very small corporations for farming 24/7 (in a lot of case using bots) with astronomical profits of trillions of isks each month.

No attackers, no fleets, no pvp, all that purple area is a totally dead region made to earn money by renting and botting, turning a fun game into renting/botting farm… if this makes you remember The Matrix you’re not far from the truth…

On the other side Imperium and allies showed a completely opposite scenario:

• any alliance, no matter its size, can live in a single region if it’s well organized
• no renting, no mafia bosses, no extortion
• the essence of the game, which makes it alive is pvp so everything should be focused on it, everything that prevents pvp should be modified or removed
• if you want to conquer a system, a constellation or an entire region you’re free to try it, get organized, get people and fight for conquer it
• if you want to stay in a system, a constellation or a region you have to fight, to get people and get resources to defend yourself
• less passive income, if you want to get resources you must have players and be active
• each region should be accessible for invasion and conquer
• small groups should be able to conquer space to get bigger and fight each other for survival, a bipolar universe is not healthy for the game.

I don’t know what you think but the last manifesto is way better and promising for the future of the game.