3rd of April, 2022
So I found myself in Berlin after living many good years in Helsinki. Moving
here has been a plan of mine for quite some time and originally it was a big
reason why I joined my current employer. I had a plan on moving here lot
earlier but due to all this COVID nonsense around the world these plans were
little bit postponed. But hey, here we are finally in lovely Kreuzberg.
Time will tell how long will I enjoy my stay here, but I pretty much sold my
every earthly belonging before moving here so move was pretty painless. Also,
if I don't gather too much more material things around my life, moving to
somewhere else would probably be quite easy!
Also this post marks a start of my (hopefully) more frequent posting in a form
of these smaller rambles. This is mainly due to reason I try to stay
"off-the-grid" from all these social platforms and my friends and family
wanted to hear more update from my side, so might as well do it here!
Looking forward to my future here in Berlin!
6th of February, 2022
First, I would like to say I think Kubernetes is an excellent platform for its
intended purposes. It provides excellent fault-tolerance all over the cluster,
a fast and easy way to run updates on your deployments, great tools for
managing services, volumes, metrics, and more, each having its own lifecycle
to manage. Also, implementing your tooling by extending the Kubernetes' API is
a trivial task, so you can easily leverage the great tooling to make your own
for whatever you might need.
Today it's also effortless to spin up a Kubernetes cluster with various
installers and different managed options. While being very complex, it's still
a step closer to the idea of "just run my code and make it work". Also, with
containers in the picture, we are pretty close to the magical situation where
we actually can run the same application similarly on the laptop and in one
cloud.
For me, issues start rising when we begin using Kubernetes for something other
than its intended purposes. While I don't have any statistics on this, I have
a pretty strong gut feeling that most of the people running Kubernetes are
using it as a glorified scheduler for placing containers on nodes as fast as
possible. While it's an excellent and overall pretty easy tool to use for
orchestrating containers, its fundamental purpose is to orchestrate anything
crucial to your infrastructure like network, storage, and other dependencies.
Kubernetes allows complete user freedom to run your infrastructure as you see
fit. Despite sounding like a cliche, this kind of freedom can bear huge
responsibilities. I would dare to say that most developers and system
administrators don't want to make these decisions. What if, at some point in
the development, you would wish to change your networking interface or maybe
some dynamic storage provider? Can you even do such a thing in that stage of
development if the decision was made before you even had anything running in
Kubernetes?
Kelsey Hightower put it nicely a while back when he described Kubernetes isn't
meant for being a developer platform but a framework for creating
platforms. So while it definitely can work as a developer platform, and
overall it's pretty easy to get started, kubectl run and kubectl expose
and your good to go. That being said, all the API designs in Kubernetes are
created for clusters and how to manage these. So while containers are part of
this, there are so much more to be leveraged. So should application
developers, startups or small businesses use something like this? Probably
not, unless they are developing a platform product.
When we get into cluster management, we need to start thinking about managing
the lifecycle of everything running inside the cluster. Unfortunately, this is
also when things start to get hard. What to do if something inside the cluster
dies? What if I need to provision something dynamically? Kubernetes is pretty
good at simplifying many of these topics, but due to the complexity of things
happening behind the scenes, all this complexity cannot be simplified
away.
Kubernetes has a high entry threshold, and it's a very complex project, but
still, way too often, I see it marketed as a simple solution for many
problems. While you can use Kubernetes in a very simple manner and get lots of
stuff done, eventually, you will hit a wall. Deploying fault-tolerant
distributed applications that are scalable against a pool of machines with
dependencies in networking, storage, and more, that's a hard
problem.
Kubernetes is built for production workloads and running infrastructure beyond
your demo application. For this reason, complexity in Kubernetes is justified
and should be approached with that mindset.
27th of January, 2022
So Spotify seems to be a shit show at the moment, at least when it comes to
sharing misinformation on their platform. On the center of it all seems to
be Joe Rogan. Spotify made a widely reported deal with Joe Rogan for exclusive
rights to his podcast in 2020. Weirdly enough, Rogan has also lately been
under heavy scrutiny for his idiotic statements about COVID.
In January 2022, 270 medical experts submitted an open letter for Spotify to
moderate this misinformation on their platform. Letter was largely prompted
because of controversial physician who openly promoted preposterous nonsense
on Joe Rogan Experience (JRE).
Few days ago, Neil Young started a protest against Spotify giving them an
ultimatum for choosing either Young's music or JRE. And well… neither Young
nor 270 medical experts was enough to change Spotify's mind about the subject
since they decided that they would rather leave JRE on their platform rather
than Young.
This is kind of weird point of view that Spotify has taken in this case since
they have already participated in self-regulation before by removing harmful
content from their platform. This kind of content has involved music that has
been connected one way or another to white supremacy or neo-nazi movements and
much more (very much understandably so). Spotify also joined many other
streaming platforms by removing another nutjob Alex Jones' podcast InfoWars
from their platform for spreading misinformation. But guess misinformation
from dear Joe Rogan is not consider harmful by their standards.
Neil Young also wrote:
I sincerely hope that other artists and record companies will move off the
SPOTIFY platform and stop supporting SPOTIFY’s deadly misinformation about
COVID.
Unfortunately while writing this not many artist have joined him in this
endeavor. But this also brings little bit unfortunate truth about the
situation, Neil Young can leave Spotify without noticing it too
much. Financially, revenue he gets from Spotify would be very minor source of
income, especially considering the fact that last year he sold 50% of his
publishing rights to the investment fund Hipgnosis, netting him $150m.
Also considering the fact the his fan base is definitely - in general - on the
older end of the spectrum. Yours truly is probably on the younger end. So most
likely larger portion of his revenue comes from physical products and live
show (although latter is probably true for large majority of artists).
Newer artists and bands can't really take this kind of stand against large
streaming platform since so much of their audience accesses their music via
these means. In most cases, they would like to please Spotify, hoping in
getting in one of their playlists and so promoting their music to very large
audience.
Any case, if more big artists joins Young, it definitely can have an impact on
Spotify since these kind of heavyweight artists are able to give some pressure
to these big companies. But only time will tell.
22nd of January, 2022
Courtesy Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism
19th of January, 2022
Some time ago I wrote a short post about my my feelings towards web analytics
which were sparked due to a spike in visitors on my site (mainly coming from
Hacker News). Due to that surge, I decided to part ways completely from any
sort of tracking, since for me it was mainly a unnecessary dopamine fix rather
than anything useful.
Today I stumbled upon big news on the front of legitimacy of web analytics
from the point of view of privacy. Turns out, as most suspected, it's not so
good, at least according to Austria's data protection authority.
Basically this case dates back to invalidation of Privacy Shield data sharing
system between the EU and the US, because of overreaching US
surveillance. Turns out that many companies in US have largely ignored this
invalidation, which happened in 2020, and despite this they have still
continued to transfer data from EU to US. The Austrian DPA held that the use
of Google Analytics by an Austrian website provider led to transfers of
personal data to Google LLC in the U.S. in violation of Chapter V. of the
GDPR.
Future of Google Analytics in EU
In the long run, there will be two options: Either the US changes its
surveillance laws to strengthen their tech businesses, or US providers will
have to host data of European users in Europe. This kind of transcontinental
transfer is currently (as the time of writing this) only illegal Austria, but
Dutch's DPA (data protection authority) has stated that Google Analytics "may
may soon no longer be allowed".
Any case, this is great thing for privacy in EU and hopefully many more
countries would join Austria in this effort. You can follow what countries
have started to follow this at Is Google Analytics ILLEGAL in your country?