Ivan on the Server Side

Hello, fellow server dweller 👋

Ivan's here with the traditional roundup of all things Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, and Server Side 🧙

What I was working on

There were quite a few things on both the content and feature sides!

Challenge Solutions 🚀

Starting with the most exciting one... It's been postponed for way too long, but I finally added a Solution tab to the challenge page.

If you get stuck with a problem or want to learn an alternative solution, it's now just one click away (for ~a third of the challenges, but the rest is coming this week).

I also think this feature takes many challenges to a totally different level of usefulness. For instance, the solution of the new "How to Dockerize a Python app" challenge contains three sample Dockerfiles that you can use as inspiration when containerizing your production workload.

python:3 image decomposed: Hundreds of megabytes of unnecessary build tools and dev-time dependencies.

Adding (and maintaining) solutions is a lot of work, so the feature is only available on the premium tier 🙈

Skill Path: Build Container Images Like a Pro

It was a topic of the mid-month newsletter, but if you missed it, I released the biggest skill path so far - it already contains 5 tutorials and 13 challenges on building container images, and I'm working on more content that will be included in this skill path in the coming weeks. The topics range from selecting an optimal base image to troubleshooting scratch container images and containerizing Node.js and Python apps "the right way." Check it out: Build Container Images Like a Pro 😎

Container image composition and the main factors that affect it.

Skill Path: Get Started with Dagger

A number of people asked me in what order the Dagger challenges should be solved, so I quickly put together this (smaller) mini-roadmap. It's definitely not enough to become a Dagger expert, but it will come in handy if you're looking for an "alternative" way to get started with the tool: Get Started with Dagger

Miscellaneous features

Content catalogs (tutorials, challenges, playgrounds, etc.) started supporting searching content by title, description, and tags.

It's now possible to stop playgrounds from the Dashboard. By the way, judging by the visit count, I think Dashboard is an underrated page.

The "Authored" sub-tabs were added, again, to the Dashboard page so you can quickly access the content you created.

Authors can now start the playgrounds "as a free tier user" to check that the content can be followed on the more restricted tier as well.

Last but not least, I finally automated the PPP discounts 🎉 No need to drop me an email (and wait for a reply). It was quite a bit of hacking, but now the premium page shows the adjusted price based on your account's region. I tried following Netflix's price reduction rates, so if you think the premium price in your region isn't right, please ping me, and I'll gladly adjust it.

Product tutorials on iximiuz Labs

A large part of the above features are oriented toward content authors. The reason for that is an increasing interest from private individuals and product companies in using iximiuz Labs to post learning materials.

Here is a perfect example by Bryce Yu - a very clean and easy-to-follow series on KubeBlocks, a "Run any Database on Kubernetes" solution, that was published on iximiuz Labs in January:

iximiuz Labs in the wild

This month, I spotted a heartwarming number of mentions of iximiuz Labs.

Turning Markdown into Learning: publishing a challenge on labs.iximiuz.com - A great post by Adam Leskis, a debuting iximiuz Labs author, describing his motivation and "author experience" after publishing his first DevOps challenge on the platform 👏 Do recommend if you want to start posting interactive technical content online.

DevOps Roadmap 2025: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering DevOps in the Modern Era - Saiyam Pathak mentions iximiuz Labs as a platform to learn DevOps (among other great resources).

Master SBOM Creation & Image Scanning for CKS Certification - Saiyam again, but this time, he actually uses an iximiuz Labs playground to showcase a few commands to deal with SBOM.

SBOM: Everything you need to know for CKS exam by Puru Tuladhar - another author who chose to use iximiuz Labs to demonstrate the ideas in their post 💪

Last but not least, iximiuz Labs Kubernetes playgrounds were mentioned several times in the CKA/CKAD/CKS exam preparation context (1, 2, 3). Way to go!

What I was reading

Go 1.24 interactive tour - traditionally by Anton Zhiyanov (and his cool codapi magic). It's [going to be] a fruitful release with a number of handy [for my use cases] additions: weak.Pointer, runtime.AddCleanup to emulate destructors, T.Context, omitzero annotations, a whole bunch of new iterator functions, and more.

An illustrated guide to Amazon VPCs - I can't recommend it enough. The amount of mystery around what VPCs are and are not is irritating, and this relatively short and fun-illustrated post does a great job outlining the historical perspective and the need for "virtual private clouds" following up with shedding just enough light on the implementation so that things finally start making sense.

We Can Resize Pods without Restarts! Or Can’t We? - A curious exploration of the “In-Place Update of Pod Resources” feature. The post is half a year old, and while the author was hoping the feature would be promoted to beta in 1.32, it didn’t actually happen. Nevertheless, the post is worth reading because it 1) gives a great example of how a good engineer should investigate any capability before starting to rely on it and 2) serves as a great addition to my Get Started with Linux Control Groups learning path as it dives deep into the implementation details via exploring the cgroupfs.

So you wanna write Kubernetes controllers? by Ahmet Alp Balkan - This is probably the first time I see the words "Kubernetes controller" and "low barrier to entry" in one sentence 🙈 Jokes aside, this post is a must-read if you're about to ship your very first Kubernetes controller to production. As Ahmet rightfully notices - creating a CRD takes 5 minutes, but migrating the production from the flawed v1 to the v2 implementation takes many months. And you can save some of this time by reading about the pitfalls instead of discovering them yourself.

Why I Will Never Use Alpine Linux Ever Again - "By using Alpine, you’re getting "free" chaos engineering for your cluster." I love this line! Alpine is a great Linux distro, but it's not a drop-in replacement for Debian or Ubuntu - the "musl vs. glibc" disparity is real (check the post for a horrifying Kubernetes debugging story caused by a lack of support of DNS-over-TCP in musl). And at the same time, a good part of the Dockerfiles submitted over the past couple of weeks on gooddockerfiles.com use alpine-based variants of python and node images. So, this is your traditional reminder that Alpine is only an experimental target platform for Node.js, and Python has a number of issues when running on Alpine, too. In Alpine's defense, DNS-over-TCP was finally implemented in Alpine 18 / musl 1.2.4, and more and more Python packages include musl builds in the wheels, so the build performance issue mentioned in the linked article is probably not as acute anymore. But still, if you want to use Alpine for your container images, it should be an informed decision and not something that was copy-pasted from a tutorial on how to build a hello-world Node.js Docker image.

Production-ready Docker packaging for Python developers - An impressive collection of posts by Itamar Turner-Trauring focused specifically on building container images for Python applications. Ranging from choosing an optimal base image and down to CI build performance optimization. I checked about 60% of the posts there, and most seem to be well-maintained (because this kind of info tends to age relatively quickly). Kudos to the author for this impressive effort.

Malicious Obfuscated NPM Package Disguised as an Ethereum Tool Deploys Quasar RAT - New year, old threats (but escalating). I'm already tired of repeating that the isolation of dev environments from the main system (and from each other) is a must-have. Single-purpose and disposable dev environments for the win.

If You Don’t Like Sales, Don't Start a Company - This is how you sell (the need for) sales. It’s a useful skill for pretty much any role, however technical it is (e.g., as the most introverted and low-level engineer, you still need to be able to sell your ideas so that they get implemented in the product).

Wrapping up

That is it for January! If you found something useful in this email, forward it to a friend or colleague - the more readers, the merrier!

Cheers

Ivan