Hey, hey!

It's Ivan Velichko, from iximiuz.com, a software engineer and a technical storyteller. That's my very first newsletter send-out, so it's totally fine if you don't even remember me. Kind reminder, you subscribed to the updates from my blog somewhere over the past six months. So, if you don't want to receive emails from me (very sad), just hit unsubscribe at the very bottom of this email. But if you decide to stay, welcome to the newborn newsletter on Containers, Kubernetes, and Backend development!

In the future, I'll try to stick with a monthly cadence for the send-outs. The newsletter will contain my most recent articles and twitter threads and may also include some extra findings I'd have come across during a month.

However, since this is the very first issue, and I started collecting emails somewhere in January, here is a quick summary from my blog and twitter since the beginning of the year.

First off, I redesigned the main page of the blog and made it much more structured. It now contains only the most successful posts, organized in series. Check it out!

The past half a year, I was extremely lucky, and the four articles of mine hit the Hacker News front page:

• ​Container Networking Is Simple!​
• ​Computer Networking Basics Every Developer Should Know​
• ​The need for slimmer containers​
• ​DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering​

This spring, I spent some time writing a command-line tool to parse and query log files as time series and as a by-product compiled a collection of cheat sheets on Prometheus and PromQL. The tool is called pq, and it's written in Rust. It's my largest Rust project so far, so I've been sharing my experience on the way:

• ​Understanding Rust Privacy and Visibility Model​
• ​Writing Parsers With nom Parser Combinator Framework​

I also spent quite some time dealing with Kubernetes and Service Mesh, so here are my finds:

• ​Exploring Kubernetes Operator Pattern​
• ​Service proxy, pod, sidecar, oh my!​
• ​KiND - How I Wasted a Day Loading Local Docker Images​
• ​Mastering Container Networking - Multiple Containers, Same Port, no Reverse Proxy​

My Twitter finally got some love. I turned it into a satellite publishing platform where I post more graphical content and threads on my traditional topics. Here is a sneak peek 😉

Ivan Velichko @iximiuz How to grasp Containers and Docker (Mega Thread) When I started using containers back in 2015, I thought they were tiny virtual machines with a subsecond startup time. It was easy to follow tutorials from the Internet on how to put your Python or Node.js app into a container... August 7th 2021 173 Retweets 838 Likes

Ivan Velichko @iximiuz Have you ever been confused while reading Kubernetes API docs? Wondering what are these: - API groups - Resources - Namespaces - API objects - CRDs - Aggregation layers ...and what are their relationships? I've got a picture for you! #Kubernetes pic.twitter.com/7LbIfyS5uf January 23rd 2021 286 Retweets 1,354 Likes

Ivan Velichko @iximiuz Docker vs. Containerd vs. Runc Here is my take on the roles of: - docker - dockerd - containerd - OCI runtime (runc) - runtime shims While it might not be 100% accurate, I find this decomposition helpful as a starting point in understanding the ecosystem. pic.twitter.com/Fhsmijb2Fw August 23rd 2021 116 Retweets 413 Likes

Ok, enough twitter span. Curious about what I'm working on right now?

• a longish and highly-illustrated Introduction to Containers article
• ​a few open-source projects, including pq and docker-to-linux 2.0
• trying to figure out how to pack things from the blog into an interactive online course on containers

Interested? Stay tuned!

At this time, I probably should finally stop adding things to the already lengthy email. If you find it helpful, please spread the word! Forward this email to your friends, follow me on Twitter, and if you have a blog, find an opportunity to mention some of my write-ups - every single backlink counts!

Last but not least, feel free to send me an email or drop a message on Twitter! I'm always more than just happy to chat about interesting technical challenges, and I love getting feedback on my content!

Stay safe!

Cheers,

Ivan Velichko