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deployments come in all shapes and sizes. We support bare metal installs on any version of , containerized installs on any version of (including Red Hat OpenShift), and installs just about anywhere you can deploy a small lightweight single binary. But with flexibility comes the inevitability that edge case issues will require debugging. MinIO Linux Kubernetes In this blog post, we’ll show you how to debug a MinIO install running in Kubernetes and also some of the common issues you might encounter when doing bare metal installation and how to rectify them. Kubernetes Debugger Pod There are a few ways to access the MinIO API running inside a Kubernetes cluster. We can use or set up a listening on to be able to access the API. Both of these methods offer a way to access the service from outside the network, but they do come with one major downside: You can only access the Service that the NodePort or Port Forwarding references on an available port (not the usual configuration for the application). For example, you have to access the MinIO API, usually found on port , via a randomly assigned port. kubectl port-forwarding Service NodePort 9000 3xxxx What if I told you there was a better way – and it's not novel? When debugging applications you want to have full access to the native run-time environment so you can use various tools to troubleshoot and debug the cluster. One way to do that is launching a “busybox” style pod and installing all the required tools needed to debug the application. First launch a into the same namespace as your MinIO install. In order to do this create a yaml file called with the following yaml. Pod debugger-pod.yaml apiVersion: v1

kind: Pod

metadata:

  name: mc

  labels:

    app: mc

spec:

  containers:

  - image: minio/mc:latest

    command:

      - "sleep"

      - "604800"

    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent

    name: mc

  restartPolicy: Always The above Pod configuration is pulling the image for MinIO utility. In order to ensure the pod doesn’t just launch and then exit, we’ve added a command. mc sleep Once the yaml is saved apply the configuration to the Kubernetes namespace where the MinIO cluster is running kubectl apply -f debugger-pod.yaml Once the pod is up and running access it via shell $ kubectl exec -i -t -n default mc -c mc -- sh -c "(bash || ash || sh)"

[root@mc /]# Then with you can access the MinIO cluster mc [root@mc /]# mc alias set myminio    --insecure

Added `myminio` successfully. Now that we have a debugger pod up and running, you can perform action on the cluster directly within the same network. For example, if the replication was broken due to an site going offline or a hardware failure, you can resync any pending objects to be replicated using the following command [root@mc /]# mc admin replicate resync start minio1 minio2


[root@mc /]# mc admin replicate resync status minio1 minio2


✔ ✔ ✔

ResyncID: 		 2248d1d1-633f-4d61-b938-d8ea0b9b2d31

Status:   		 Completed

Objects:  		 2225

Versions: 		 2225

FailedObjects:     0

Throughput:   	 5.3 MiB/s

IOPs:     		 124.23 objs/s

Transferred:  	 94 MiB

Elapsed:  		 17.909833202s

CurrObjName:  	 testbucket/web-app/tsconfig.json Another reason you would run the debugger pod is if there are some file system permissions or invalid groups configurations in your pod, you can update them using the debugger pod [root@mc /]# chgrp -R 1000780050 .minio.sys/ The above debugging method can also be used in bare metal environments. For instance you can launch a busybox or bastion node with installed and follow the same instructions as above. mc Debugging Bare Metal Bare metal Linux installs are the most straightforward. In fact it just takes a few commands to get MinIO installed and running with SystemD. For details, please see . Configuring MinIO with SystemD Once in a great while, bare metal installs go awry. Here are some of the (not-so-common) pitfalls that we are asked about  in or . These pitfalls are not hardware or operating specific but can be useful to know in any kind of environment. SUBNET Slack File Permission One of the most common pitfalls is the file permissions of the MinIO binary and the configuration file. If this occurs, when you start MinIO using SystemD you will see and here is the full stack trace Assertion failed for MinIO. # systemctl status minio.service

● minio.service - MinIO

     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/minio.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

     Active: inactive (dead)

     Assert: start assertion failed at Tue 2023-12-26 18:21:38 PST; 8s ago

             AssertFileIsExecutable=/usr/local/bin/minio was not met

       Docs: https://docs.min.io


Dec 26 18:13:37 minio1 systemd[1]: minio.service: Starting requested but asserts failed.

Dec 26 18:17:50 minio1 systemd[1]: Assertion failed for MinIO.

Dec 26 18:21:38 minio1 systemd[1]: minio.service: Starting requested but asserts failed.

Dec 26 18:21:38 minio1 systemd[1]: Assertion failed for MinIO. This could be caused by a number of reasons, let's go down the list and check for each of them. : The binary, in this example located at needs to have permission for user and group, respectively. MinIO Binary /usr/local/bin/minio root:root # ll /usr/local/bin/minio

total 93804

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root    root    96018432 Nov 15 16:35  minio* : The MinIO service needs to run under a unique Linux user and group for security purposes, never run as a user. By default we use for the user and group names. In the SystemD service config file you should see something like this MinIO Service User and Group root minio-user User=minio-user

Group=minio-user : The directory where MinIO data will be stored needs to be owned by or whichever user you decide to run the MinIO service as above. MinIO Data Dir minio-user:minio-user # ls -l /mnt

total 4

drwxrwxr-x 2 minio-user minio-user 4096 Dec 27 09:58 data : Both the config files should have permissions for user and group like so SystemD and MinIO config root:root # ls -l /etc/default/minio

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1330 Dec 27 09:52 /etc/default/minio


# ls -l /etc/systemd/system/minio.service

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 941 Dec 26 17:13 /etc/systemd/system/minio.service : The entire install process should be run as . You can also try if your user has permissions but the recommendation is to run as root as the install needs to place files in a bunch of places that only the user can access. Your bash prompt should have a and not a like so Run as Root root sudo root # $ vs # $ If none of the above work, the best approach is to remove the app, directories and configs and start a fresh install as a root user. Port conflict Another common issue related to deleted files which still hold on to the process, which causes port conflicts. Even when a service is not running, you may be unable to start a new service on the existing port or the service that is running will misbehave (such as not allowing you to login). # lsof -n | grep (deleted)

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE   SIZE 	NODE NAME

nginx   	13423 root 5u  	REG 253,3   42949672960 	17 (deleted)

minio 	13423 minio 6u    REG 253,3 	0         	      18 (deleted)

minio       13423 minio 7u    REG 253,3 	0         	      19 (deleted) You might see errors such as those below on a MinIO install Login Failed net::ERR_FAILED 500 Internal Server Error 401 Unauthorized The screenshot above shows an internal server error and an unauthorized error. While looking at the surface it looks unclear what has caused this error, we can debug with a little linux knowledge what to look for that could cause this, let's take a gander. There are several ways to debug this issue, first lets check to see if multiple MinIO processes are running on the same node # ps aux | grep -i minio

minio-u+    5048  0.3  1.7 1594008 144384 ?      Ssl  11:03   0:01 /usr/local/bin/minio server --console-address :9001 /mnt/data/disk1/minio


minio-u+    9276  0.3  1.7 1594208 144301 ?      Ssl  11:25   0:01 /usr/local/bin/minio server --console-address :9001 /mnt/data/disk1/minio As we can see above there are 2 MinIO processes running. Start by killing the process that is older or has been running the longest, in this case it seems to be the process ID . 5048 kill -9 5048 Sometimes even after killing the process the service might still not start or might still get hung up because it has reserved a process number but not let it go. This can be caused by files that have been deleted but are still being tracked by the operating system. You can find the deleted files via LSOF lsof -n | grep '(deleted)' Last but not least, if there are no deleted files left over or hung processes and if everything looks absolutely clean, the last resort is to quickly restart the node. This is a no-nonsense method that  shuts down and clears any pending files and processes so you start a fresh install. SUBNET to the rescue Although rare, installation edge cases will always exist. MinIO customers know that they have nothing to worry about because they can quickly message our engineers – who have written the code – via the portal. We've seen almost everything under the sun, so while the issue might look cryptic or mind boggling at first glance, we'll put our years of expertise debugging installations in many varied environments to work and help you in a jiffy. SUBNET If you have any questions on troubleshooting and debugging installs be sure to reach out to us on ! MinIO Slack

Pro Tips for Debugging MinIO: Overcoming Common Issues in Kubernetes and Bare Metal Environments

MinIO ডিবাগ করার জন্য প্রো টিপস: কুবারনেটস এবং বেয়ার মেটাল পরিবেশে সাধারণ সমস্যাগুলি অতিক্রম করা

Profi-Tipps zum Debuggen von MinIO: Überwindung häufiger Probleme in Kubernetes- und Bare-Metal-Umgebungen

Consejos profesionales para depurar MinIO: superar problemas comunes en Kubernetes y entornos bare metal

Conseils de pro pour déboguer MinIO : surmonter les problèmes courants dans les environnements Kubernetes et Bare Metal

मिनियो डिबगिंग के लिए प्रो टिप्स: कुबेरनेट्स और बेयर मेटल वातावरण में आम समस्याओं पर काबू पाना

MinIO デバッグのプロのヒント: Kubernetes とベアメタル環境での一般的な問題の克服

MinIO 디버깅을 위한 전문가 팁: Kubernetes 및 베어메탈 환경의 일반적인 문제 극복

Dicas profissionais para depuração do MinIO: superando problemas comuns em ambientes Kubernetes e Bare Metal

Советы для профессионалов по отладке MinIO: решение распространенных проблем в Kubernetes и средах с голым железом

MinIO'da Hata Ayıklamaya Yönelik Profesyonel İpuçları: Kubernetes ve Bare Metal Ortamlarında Yaygın Sorunların Aşılması

Mẹo chuyên nghiệp để gỡ lỗi MinIO: Khắc phục các sự cố thường gặp trong môi trường Kubernetes và Bare Metal

调试 MinIO 的专业技巧：解决 Kubernetes 和裸机环境中的常见问题

Email communication is a critical aspect of any business operation, and while convenience and affordability are essential, the choice of an email service provider should be driven by more than just convenience. Bare Metal Email, through extensive research on email operations, highlights the significant impact of email choices on businesses. As a potential , Bare Metal Email claims to have developed premium security and addresses deliverability issues within organizations. Let’s dive deeper to find out more. Gmail alternative Over the past decade, Bare Metal Email has concentrated on developing a comprehensive system to resolve deliverability challenges and enhance business workflows. Unlike competitors such as Gmail, their six-layer system focuses on multiple aspects of email functionality. The first layer involves scrutinizing the network for blocks and spammers that could affect reputation. The IP layer ensures the cleanliness and absence of blocks in the IPs. Moving to the domain layer, Bare Metal Email scans the customer's network for potential blocks. The ESP layer, the recipient of the email, is checked for general blocks and specifically for blocks related to the sender's domain. This thorough approach ensures that emails sent by businesses are not flagged as spam or blocked by recipients. The final two layers of the Bare Metal Email system analyze the structure and text of emails to ensure correct delivery. The Heuristic layer employs AI and algorithms to detect keywords that might trigger blocking by recipients. The layer examines the email’s code for potential issues like broken hyperlinks that could lead to spam filtering on the recipient’s end. This meticulous scanning process reflects Bare Metal Email's commitment to addressing issues at every level of email composition. HTML We’ve all questioned whether Google, and Gmail by extension, is listening to us. Those suspiciously placed ads for a product you had spoken to a friend about not 10 minutes previously. Bare Metal Email claims to distinguish itself by offering a security system that is both robust and noninvasive. The company incorporates strong security measures at each layer, eliminating the need for two-factor identification. This approach contrasts with the common advice for businesses to use complex passwords, backups, and multiple authentication methods, often resulting in account lockouts and wasted time. Bare Metal Email aims to provide a secure and accessible email experience without the restrictions and complexities associated with multiple Gmail accounts. Good email providers recognize the evolving landscape of business communication and the importance of adaptability. With a commitment to staying ahead of emerging threats and technological advancements, Bare Metal Email claims to regularly update its system to address new challenges. This approach ensures its clients benefit from ongoing improvements and the latest security measures. In a rapidly changing digital environment, having an email provider that prioritizes both current needs and future developments is a valuable asset for businesses seeking a reliable and sustainable communication solution. In a world where communication is paramount, especially through email, we can vouch that Bare Metal Email has positioned itself as a . The company assures users that its system sources and solves deliverability issues, such as blacklisting and spam filters, offering businesses a solution to ensure their emails reach the intended recipients without complications, and where complications exist - solutions. reliable alternative to Gmail - By: Tom White

Exploring Bare Metal Email as a Gmail Alternative for Business

ব্যবসার জন্য একটি Gmail বিকল্প হিসাবে বেয়ার মেটাল ইমেল অন্বেষণ

Entdecken Sie Bare-Metal-E-Mail als Gmail-Alternative für Unternehmen

Explorando el correo electrónico básico como alternativa a Gmail para empresas

Explorer la messagerie Bare Metal comme alternative à Gmail pour les entreprises

व्यवसाय के लिए जीमेल विकल्प के रूप में बेअर मेटल ईमेल की खोज

ビジネス向けの Gmail 代替としてのベア メタル メールの検討

비즈니스용 Gmail 대안으로 베어메탈 이메일 탐색

Explorando o e-mail Bare Metal como uma alternativa ao Gmail para empresas

Изучение электронной почты в качестве альтернативы Gmail для бизнеса

İşletmeler için Gmail Alternatifi Olarak Bare Metal E-postayı Keşfetmek

Khám phá email kim loại trần như một giải pháp thay thế Gmail cho doanh nghiệp

探索裸机电子邮件作为 Gmail 的企业替代品

Big Data processing, BI analysis, and AI involve heavy usage of , including This requires tremendous computational power: hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, tens of CPU cores, as well as graphics cards and/or special chips to speed up calculations. ML neural networks. Problems When working in a big heterogeneous team (data analysts and researchers, development engineers, system engineers, etc.) on a large system, employees from different teams use various tools to solve problems. This applies both to development and runtime environments (Python, Matlab, Java, C/C++, etc.) and databases used (RDBMS, NoSQL, files, etc.). Retraining can be time-consuming, expensive, and even impossible in the short run. The introduction of new technologies can make it undesirable or impossible to stick to a universal toolkit. For example, most components of an AI system may be implemented in Java but you may need libraries in Python, and other languages to implement a new model. You will have to integrate them: reimplementing these features in the current toolkit may take a long time and be costly for the business. C/C++, Vertical scaling may be too expensive or impossible. Of course, it depends on the capacity of your provider’s data centers but, in practice, all of them have their limitations. This sets a limit on boosting computational resources in a single node. You will have to use several nodes grouped into a cluster to achieve the required capacity. In some cases, when specialized computing equipment (like , , and Tensor Cores) is required, it is reasonable to buy your own servers and install them in your provider’s data centers. Nvidia Tesla Solutions Containerisation To solve the problems of toolkit heterogeneity, OCI-compliant systems are used. A containerized application is an application and its runtime environment in a particular format that runs in an isolated environment in a container management system. Containers can contain almost any application and system-level applications (WEB, Data, ML, applications, DNS servers, NET balancers, etc.). All of them will run in an isolated environment to avoid conflicts between system libraries and to differentiate access and resources in a flexible way. Docker is the most popular container platform. It includes both tools to build containerized applications and a daemon that lets you run and manage containerized applications within a single node. Orchestration The core problem that Kubernetes is solving is the ability to manage containers at scale. Kubernetes is the most well-known and standardized cluster orchestration system. Kubernetes clusters are available from almost any major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). Of course, there are other containerization technologies and container cluster management systems, but Kubernetes on Docker is the most common and standard solution at the moment. Let’s start with the special considerations to be taken into account when choosing a solution for Kubernetes, and then proceed with the specifics of the AI systems architecture in a Kubernetes cluster. As described above, the main options are a managed cluster in the cloud and your own cluster on bare metal. Let's take a closer look at these cases. Cloud Cloud providers offer scalability, ease of use, and high availability through their robust infrastructure and redundancy measures. Cloud services provide flexibility, accessibility, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with other applications. Additionally, cloud providers often have robust security measures and disaster recovery solutions in place, providing reliability and data protection. Bare Metal Bare metal infrastructure provides dedicated hardware resources and offers more control and customization options compared to cloud computing. It is well-suited for workloads that require high performance, low latency, and specific hardware configurations. Furthermore, bare metal infrastructure allows for greater freedom in choosing and implementing specific platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, without being limited to proprietary offerings often provided by cloud providers. Comparison Cluster in the cloud Pros Maintenance is performed by the cloud provider. You don’t need a separate cluster administrator, most of the time developers will be able to manage the cluster themselves. Databases and other infrastructure with automatic scaling (S3, DynamoDB, RDS, Redshift, etc.) are available. The number of cluster resources can be changed quickly if necessary. Malfunctions are less frequent. Cons Expensive (please see the comparison below). Higher probability of vendor lock-in when the provider’s technologies are used (e.g., DynamoDB). Malfunctions (when they occur) take longer time to fix. A limited list of appropriate equipment, and you can’t use custom hardware. In many cases, no transparent pricing plans. Comments Of course, it is easier to use a cloud cluster than to deploy your own, at first. But then, when you encounter problems with troubleshooting, finding the cause and possible solution can take much longer and be more painful. You will be limited in your access to the system level, which entails additional difficulties in diagnosing and solving these problems. Some you may not be able to solve by yourself without the access to the system level, so you will have to wait for help from tech support. Be careful when using a cloud provider's proprietary services. They lead to vendor lock-in. If at some point you become dissatisfied with your cloud provider, it will be harder to stop using their services because you already have solutions implemented on the basis of those products (e.g., proprietary NoSQL storages). Cluster on bare metal Pros Renting bare metal servers from hosting providers is several times cheaper than renting nodes from cloud providers (please see an example of price comparison below). Greater flexibility in selection, configuration and installation of the equipment. Colocation. You can build your own equipment and install it in a data center. It is relevant if you use specific equipment (graphics cards, tensor cores, hardware encryption, etc.). Troubleshooting often goes faster as there are no hard vendor lock-ins, which allows for rapid migration and provides a wide choice of solutions. Greater flexibility in the choice and configuration of systems and services. Cons You need a dedicated expert or even an entire administration team for cluster maintenance, including deployment, monitoring, and backup. Malfunctions are more frequent early on, depending on the skills of your expert. Scaling requires more time. It may include adding servers, changing the configuration, or migrating to other racks and/or data centers. Comments When you choose hardware, give preference to dedicated servers. When using virtual servers, you may notice periodic drops in IO or CPU performance, and this affects the speed and stability of the calculations. You should also pay attention to the organization of your server network. Keeping servers in the same data center works fine, but putting them on the same rack and switch is far better. High speed and stability of the connection between your servers fix a lot of problems. For bare metal providers, this service is called colocation. Architecture Deployment As you know, the Kubernetes cluster consists of control and data planes. Let’s focus on the data plane nodes: Data application nodes collect data for ML applications. Master Data is storage where data application pods upload prepared data. If the entire dataset is placed into local node storage, it is recommended to fully replicate the data to all the nodes. This significantly reduces the number of failures and network load when ML application pods read the data. ClickHouse and/or MinIO can be used as Master Data. You can use colocation and connect an entire rack to a single fast 10GE switch. However, even in this case, it is important to group the prepared data properly. Then you will be able to use one of the binary storage formats and avoid overhead expenses for scraping. Models and related functions run on ML application nodes. They perform inference and record the results. Result storage nodes must be able to take in data analysis results, evaluate them and provide access to them externally. You can use ClickHouse and/or MinIO as a Data Master. You can write your own scheduler using Kubernetes API or use built-in, Dagster, Airflow, and other schedulers. During the implementation, it is important to control the number of records in etcd for pods. Filled application pods need to be cleaned now and then, otherwise, etcd will become overfilled and the cluster will die. Load sharing across multiple nodes. When ML applications run, resources are used to their fullest, and this is a typical situation. It is important to always have free resources for system services. An exception is environments for dev testing: they can be located in a single node for cost saving. Backup and Monitoring subsystems should be in a separate space that does not depend on your Data and ML subsystems. It is important that it includes the creation of a set of backups at different points in time and their testing to manage sudden failures, as part of scheduled drills. Last but not least are your master nodes that contain the Kubernetes control plane. Conclusions If your AI system is in the development phase and does not require constant resource utilization, opting for a cloud provider is a sensible choice. By renting spot and on-demand instances for specific tasks, you can avoid paying for idle resources and potentially save money. However, for AI systems that require continuous cluster utilization and have specific hardware needs, employing a bare metal provider becomes a logical consideration, provided your team has the required expertise. In terms of disaster recovery and security, cloud providers typically offer robust built-in measures such as data replication, geographic redundancy, and automated backup and recovery solutions. This provides a level of protection against data loss and ensures business continuity in case of unforeseen events. On the other hand, bare metal infrastructure allows for more control over security measures, enabling organizations to implement their own customized security protocols and maintain direct control over data privacy and compliance. However, this also means that the responsibility for implementing and managing disaster recovery and security measures falls solely on the internal SRE.

AI at Scale: Cloud or Bare Metal

I wasn't really a fan of cloud development until I was forced to have a nice experience with it, thanks to . I have been working for the China site development project for The Gospel Coalition recently, and the story comes with an awful start: TeamCode Just two days before the project should be up, I was called to Beijing for emergency outstation work. Traveling between places, I could've spent more than ten hours but my new MacBook has nothing installed. I was overwhelmed. How am I supposed to get all this work done? Are all these time on the train wasted? I could've been done developing and debugging within that ten hours. To be clear of what I'm doing, these are my project overalls: Project Background The project I'm working for The Gospel Coalition is an independent site development project outsourced to a Chinese team. The whole working team is rather globalized, and the site development project is done through collaborations around the world. Project Structure Compared to the complicated project background, the project structure is rather simple. It consists of three independent services: WordPress: Enabled for the editors as a backstage for content management, allowing them to post their articles and access to other contents Databases: A MySQL database. Both services will be accessing the same database, with WordPress writing in it while the official site reads Independent Official Site: Displaying content. We're not using WordPress templates as there are a lot of customizations. The site is independently developed with Java (Spring Boot + Thymeleaf) Original Developing Plan and Strategy Since we're communicating through email, the procedure of applying for a test server would take too much time. Hence, I've started developing the project after applying for the access to the test data. Now that my part has done and it's now in the process of joint debugging and acceptance inspection, I'll need to: Apply for a test server Configure the test server environment Install Jenkins and configure its deployment information Deploying the local project and email the PM for acceptance inspection Make changes according to the feedback and ... LOOP the previous process. Some First Try on Cloud Development Everything would be in time if there wasn't an outstation task. Sitting in a KFC 40 minutes before the train departs, I was puzzled by a series of problems: I couldn't code right now because I'll need to download a lot of programs for the new MacBook, configuring the developing environment etc., and most importantly - how fast can we expect for the internet speed out there? I don't even have that much time to wait! Cloud native and distance collaborative development came up in my mind. Just as what I've said, I didn't really want to change my old working style despite cloud development being the future trend, and a simple understanding of it was all for me. I first heard TeamCode's product in a gathering weeks ago. Since there's no better idea at that time, I decided to give it a try on the way to Beijing. How bad could that be? I'm going to explain what I've done with it and how it eventually helps me to get all my troublesome tasks done just in time: I turned on my MacBook, connected to my hotspot. And there goes the old process, I googled TeamCode, create an account and log into it. What surprised me was that deployment process: After authorizing my Git repository into Pylon, the Java development environment was created within 5 seconds! The configuration I chose was the default 2 vCPU with 4G RAM, more or less a virtual Linux machine. Then, I pulled down the codes. Perhaps Pylon detected that I was working on my project with Java, so Git and Maven were installed by default. It supports both VSCode and a built-in Cloud-IDE. Since all the basic services and styles were done developing, there is only a few tweaks and debugging left. I skipped for downloading another IDE and worked directly on its Cloud-IDE. I started worrying again when I found out that I'll need to structure mvn install before starting everything. According to my previous experience, downloading all these dependencies may need more than 20 minutes and my hotspot might not be able to sustain it. It should be based on the server's internet and algorithm power, I shouldn't be worrying about it. After the dependencies' downloads have started, I packed my MacBook and start boarding the train. Although it was set up as expected when I got onto my seat, it is still exciting to see everything was ready to go. Then, I realized ... Hey, wasn't this a remote machine? Now that my debugging was done after 2 hours of hard work on the bullet train, another problem puzzled me: How should I send the project to the PM for inspection, without applying for a server and let alone deploying Jenkins? Puzzling around for an optimum solution, I really appreciate that the TeamCode's FAQs were undoubtably helpful! I tried on Tin - another cloud solution provided by TeamCode - to launch the application and my puzzling for purchasing a test server and deployment task were solved in the blink of an eye. Tin is basically a product that packs application, so it really helps as the PM is only interested in the results and not the codes. I uploaded my codes to Git repository again and created a Tin for the PM. After I've done a quick check on Tin, I've sent an invitation link to join my workspace. The project can now be accessed by clicking on the endpoint on Tin. It can even be upgraded for rapid deployment if there are any changes. After emailing to the PM, I have even some time left before arriving in Beijing. Some Interlude Everything goes smoothly for the first night: The PM is able to inspect the project through Tin. He did propose a few issues and they are all resolved with Cloud-IDE + Pylon. After a few emails back and forth, the inspections are basically done. After another long day of work, we encountered another bug while I was on the metro, traveling back to Shanghai. One of the JS methods in a page conflicted with the overall method and the page could not be opened! It's just an hour before the official release and there's no way for me to code on the metro. I'm in a dead guilt if the whole project has to be delayed and everyone needs to work over-time just because of me. In this great desperate situation, I tried to ask if the front end programmers could help. I sent an invitation link to him and "forced" him to join my workspace to help modify the codes. He finally agreed to help after acknowledging that there was no need for environmental deployment, structuring and all those troublesome tasks - and a big meal treat from me. We communicated over the phone by instructing him how to use Pylon and Cloud-IDE. Thanks to his quick turnaround, everything was done in 10 minutes. The application was updated on Tin, the PM inspected it, and ... Phew, the site was smoothly launched on time. Notes These incidents really gave me a first hand experience on cloud collaboration on the go. I really appreciate that everything was done on time and there is no need to work over the weekends. This opportunity really changed me by having a nice experience of developing and inspection with the fragmented time. From my experience, I guess that cloud developing with TeamCode would help in these situations: A Flexible Development Situation. Cloud-IDE + Pylon would be helpful if you're changing between computers and working environments. Since the resources are all on the cloud and there is no need for environmental deployment, cloud developing can be rather flexible. Pack and Deploy Rapidly. Tin would be helpful for situations such as inspections, demo presentations, technical communications, rapid POC etc. It enables us to display our project to the others conveniently. Team Collaboration. For example, your teammates can debug on the project directly and there are no worries about time and geographical difference. Everyone could make use of the service according to their own tempo on TeamCode as most of the services are automated. Thank you for reading my article and hope my experience will be helpful to you.

Coding in Public Transit: How I Just Barely Shipped a New Site with Pylon, Tin, and TeamCode 

Anthos on Bare Metal: How to Manage a Private Cluster From the Cloud

. Sex, money, tech and power. One way or another, all major world events have been tied to one of these four concepts OnlyFans, a social media platform created to share explicit content against tips, finds a way to merge all four. In doing so, it also manages to elegantly reflect the state of technology in 2021. Censorship, the dispersion of creativity, COVID’s impact on the economy, sexism… What equally affects a young woman in Paris and an American art director in Ukraine will inevitably affect us all. The Uberisation of Sex is Here Like many other young women throughout the world, Paris native , started her OnlyFans account in March 2020. She signed onto the platform after modelling on a variety of platforms, because the community within which she evolves had relentlessly asked her to sign up. “ , she specifies. ” She is now in the top 1% of content creators on the platform. All her subscribers pay a monthly fee to access her content, which ensures she has a comfortable life in a famously expensive city. Hélène, aka EnMarcheNoire Honestly, I started off a bit haphazardly and it worked out very well financially for me” “It’s become my main source of income today, even though I never really tried to maximise it. This process will sound familiar to many OnlyFans content creators. Most start off as Instagram or TikTok models, gathering a huge following by posting mildly racy lifestyle photos. Nothing too explicit, but enough to cater to both men and women on the platforms which sustain them. . “ ”, “ ”, “ ”… From there, two options present themselves. Then come the comments Hey if you don’t mind I want to f*** you Let me throw it in your *** I want kiss your beautiful feets my precious queen Block and ignore this unwanted fanbase, or ask them to put their wallet where their mouth is . During the COVID pandemic, many women chose the latter. Thousands created OnlyFans accounts, and let their followers know that for a nominal monthly fee, they would be able to chat together, receive exclusive, explicit and personalised photos, videos, texts and more. Chris Hunt, a fashion industry veteran turned OnlyFans marketing advisor, confirms the permeability between various social platforms: “ ” For most models, it really is just money. It’s a way for them to pay their bills without doing much different than what they were already doing on Instagram. Obviously, good marketing and clever pricing is encouraged to best influence demand. But truth be told, demand was never going to be an issue: . many men are tired of major adult websites’ lack of authenticity, and have been primed by the likes of Uber, Netflix, and Spotify to respond positively to the immediacy and personalisation that OnlyFans offers Pick a girl you like, send her money, get a nude. The Uberisation of sex is here. Once the word came out that , searches for “ ”, and “ ” skyrocketed. And as more content creators came in, yet more users followed, thanks to shrewd advertising on Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. OnlyFans went from having 90,000 creators in 2019 to 1 million in December 2020, for a total of 85 million registered users at the start of 2021, against 50 million in August 2020. a young woman w as making up to $30,000 a month on the platform what is OnlyFans? How does OnlyFans work? Most Creators don’t Make a Lot of Money… But the Platform is Making a Killing OnlyFans has grown steadily since the pandemic hit. There are three obvious reasons as to why this happened: and . Adult performers and models eager to make up for lost earnings have flocked to OnlyFans, while lonely men have found a way to add some excitement to an otherwise dull year of confinement. many people lost their jobs in 2020 and looked to supplement their incomes, celebrities legitimised the platform by joining , dates became harder to come by as a majority of the world’ population sheltered at home The platform’s financial pitch is straightforward. If an Instagram model has 100,000 followers' and converts 1% of them to OnlyFans subscribers, the money quickly adds up, even if we only base ourselves on the 12$ average subscriber’s monthly payment. According to Hunt, this simplicity is a double-edged sword : “ It’s easy to take selfies and make videos, but actually getting users to the platform is really difficult. If a girl doesn’t have that built-in audience already developed on Instagram or TikTok, you really have to start from scratch .” Therein lies the issue. What OnlyFans systematically fails to advertise is that payments very heavily favour top content creators; . research shows that the top 1% of accounts make 33% of the money Since , this means that the top 10,000 content creators make an average of $6,600 a month, while the remaining 99% have to make do with 133$ a month. the platform is (allegedly) paying out more than $200 million a month to its creators . Now in its 4th year of operations, OnlyFans generated more than $2 billion in sales last year, of which it keeps about 20%, . This imbalance is unlikely to change anytime soon for a total of $400 million in revenues in 2020 Make no mistakes : nude or clothed, the rich getting richer is a staple of post-2016 tech. Just like everywhere else in tech, a conversation about the just remuneration of the thousands of workers turning a select few into millionaires is well worth having. An OnlyFans IPO, but at what cost? OnlyFans is just the latest company to bypass major players in their industry to connect users directly with creators. , , , , , and . Substack Patreon Twitch Cameo Etsy TikTok all have made great strides over the past year by promising to reduce barriers between creators and their fans, dealing blow after blow to traditional gatekeepers Both economically and socially, this dispersion of creativity is the most important trend in tech over the past 5 years. With its millions of users, and comparably small cut (20%), the appeal of OnlyFans is obvious, and many traditional actors are crowding the space to ensure they get a piece of the action. Musicians . The Dream and Swae Lee have promoted new music on the platform, Drag queen Shea Coulee has filmed herself doing makeup before performances, social media personality YesJulz has used it to share fitness workouts These new users are bypassing both traditional fundraising players like , and personalised videos newcomers such as . Patreon Cameo But many models are worried that a turn to respectability may leave hard-working performers and sex workers who built the platform from scratch with little to show for it. This has already happened , and . on Tumblr on Patreon . Hélène has been cultivating a following on specifically to ensure she would not be left penniless should this happen. Sex workers are often the first to be left behind when a platform takes off many different platforms “ There’s always this worry, and that’s why I’m getting my content everywhere, on all platforms. In theory, I like that the platform is democratised and open to a different type of content. It shows that you’re not a pariah just because you have an OnlyFans account. But in fact, sex workers are always the first to suffer from new rules once a platform is popular enough. If OnlyFans manages to prosper thanks to non-sexual content, I’d be worried that the platform would close access to sexual content." She’s right to be worried: OnlyFans probably has the ambition to IPO someday soon (rumours abound), and a platform without smut might be more palatable to Wall Street. This theme of censorship is prevalent in today’s discussions about Tech: What should be censored, and what shouldn’t? What do we owe to stigmatised sex workers? Can platforms really be both judge and jury? Is the commodification of adult content a net positive or negative for society at large? Here too, fights over a small platform are reflected in the wider world. Can You Take Back Something that was Never Truly Yours? . OnlyFans was birthed by the natural voyeuristic impulses of young men, and by decades of hinting to young women that their body and what they did with it defined much of their worth For years, sexist men (and women) have used the following phrase to shame women in control of their sexuality : “ .” Having been told this since teenagerhood, many women have come to the conclusion that what gave them value was scarcity. . If a key opens many locks, it’s a great key. But if a lock is opened by many keys, it’s a terrible lock And where there is scarcity, there is money to be made . Full control over content, pricing, time of publishing, virtually no middle-man. Enter OnlyFans, a platform that exists for the sole purpose of banking on that scarcity It would be easy to argue that the OnlyFans is creating a new paradigm for sex work, where women are in control. one however wonders if it’s even possible for women to reclaim their sexuality in a deeply entrenched patriarchal society, or if claiming to do so is just a lie women tell themselves so they can more comfortably cater to the male gaze. On the other hand, conversations like this one often infantilises them, painting them as incapable of engaging in these discussions themselves, which is itself a product of the deeply misogynistic society we live in. To paraphrase a truly wonderful Netflix show, . Hélène is not a victim. She was not forced into the adult industry. In fact, she started her career in the adult industry while interning at Microsoft “ I saw that working in a big company without being on my own was not a thing for me. With all these platforms… I am lucky not to be just another employee. I never did this really for the money. It just allows me to do what I want when I want. It’s my dream job." Hunt confirms that models on the platform enjoy the money, but that there can often be underlying reasons to join the platform. “ he says, ” For other girls it’s a creative expression”, “it’s another way for them to create. There are fashion models who really like fashion, but they also like doing artistic things that may involve nudity. They’re attracted to being able to show another side of themselves in a way that they can actually monetise. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to argue that everyone is using the platform of their own volition. Headlines have flourished of late with stories of , . students having to get by through the sale of nudes of workers fired for using the platform to complement their income It’s a lot easier to explain the platform’s success as a correlation to the government’s inability to help young women in need, rather than through any form of feminist movement. . By using these tools, it acts as a bellwether for society, reflecting and accentuating our most pressing issues. If we work hard enough on these issues, maybe, just maybe, there might be a time when OnlyFans is no longer newsworthy. Sex, money, tech and power. OnlyFans uses two, and generates the others Fingers crossed. This article was originally written for , a blog providing in-depth analyses of today’s technological challenges. . The Pourquoi Pas Click here to access it Lead image courtesy of Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

OnlyFans’ Truth Laid Bare: The Marriage of Sex, Money, Tech and Power

Lessons learned There’s a lot of buzz around Google Anthos! I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked “What IS Anthos?!”. Well today I’m NOT going to answer that question! However, what I will do is (hopefully!) help some of you to spin up your very own Anthos bite-size cluster on some relatively inexpensive hardware thanks to the newest “flavor” of Anthos: Anthos on Bare Metal. From there you’ll be able to explore the features of Anthos for yourself, and embark on your own Anthos journey of discovery! Anthos on Bare Metal allows you to spin up a cluster from as few as 2 Intel NUCs. It’s a relatively straightforward process, but the process can be a little daunting if you haven’t been through it before. I encountered a few issues along the way, so what I’m walking you through today is my “path of least resistance”! So let’s start with the hardware. I got sent 3 Intel NUCs. Each of them has a Core I7 Gen 10 processor, 32GB of RAM, and 256 GB SSD. To be more specific, here's everything that I needed to get up and running: 3x Core : 6 cores / 32GB DDR4 Mem / 256GB SSD NUC10i7FNH i7-10710U 8-port GbE switch (optional if you have enough ports on your router / switch) 4xRJ45 CAT5E 16GB USB Stick to install Ubuntu You can install Anthos on Bare Metal on Ubuntu, CoreOS, or RHEL servers. (See more details ). here Out of the box the NUCs come with Ubuntu installed. However, the Kernel version led to issues with Ansible for me, so I started from scratch and created a bootable USB stick that would install “virgin” Ubuntu 20.04 onto each NUC. I will create my cluster out of just 2 of the NUCs (which is really the minimum we’d recommend). The third I will use as my “workstation” in order to bootstrap the cluster using the command-line tool. All is not lost, however, we can add that third NUC to the cluster later, once it’s up and running! bmctl Happy-path install process Connect one of the NUCs to a monitor and keyboard. Boot it up. In the case of the NUCs I received, Ubuntu was already installed. We’ll use this machine as a workstation for now. Open a terminal & (you'll need the password for the default user) sudo su mkdir usb-boot && cd usb-boot Copy over shell script from (Thanks to my colleague Cody Hill for this!) https://github.com/c0dyhi11/ubuntu-20-04-autoinstall/blob/main/build_iso.sh chmod +x build_iso.sh Insert a USB stick into the NUC and note the device that represents the USB stick (i.e. ) fdisk -l /dev/sda (whatever is returned from above) ./build_iso.sh -F /dev/sda Ubuntu ISO will be downloaded and written to the USB stick. N.B. command will finish but writing may continue. Wait 5 mins. Powerdown your NUC. Connect your second NUC to monitor and keyboard. Insert the USB stick created in step 8. Power on. Press until the boot menu shows. Select the USB stick to boot from. If there are multiple partitions, select the first. F11 Ubuntu install will proceed. Select language, keyboard layout, network configuration (strongly recommended to switch to “manual” network config and assign a static IP). I selected not to download updates. For storage config you can just accept defaults. Do not install any other options / software / tools when prompted. You will be prompted to create a username and password. Use whatever you would like, just make a note of it. My suggestion would be to name the machine nuc-1 (and then nuc-2, and so on). At this stage you can elect to copy over an SSH key from Git if you’d like, or you can perform this step later (described in ). step 19 Wait for install / updates to fully complete (“Reboot” will show as option at bottom when it’s done). Reboot. Remove USB stick when prompted. NUC will reboot into Ubuntu. Disconnect monitor and keyboard from NUC. Repeat steps 11-14 for remaining NUC(s). Reconnect workstation NUC and boot up. Open a terminal & generate an SSH key: ssh-keygen -t rsa and copy to clipboard cat $home/.ssh/id_rsa.pub SSH into each NUC in turn (using username and password set in ) Paste in public SSH key and save Perform further steps listed here: step 12 ssh snuc@192.168.1.201 sudo su vi /root/.ssh/authorized_key Configuring Ubuntu | Anthos on bare metal From the workstation NUC validate you can SSH to each NUCvia (N.B use the path to the private SSH key you previously generated, and the IP address of each of your node NUCs). You should be able to connect to the NUC as root without being prompted for a password. ssh -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i /home/ubuntu/.ssh/id_rsa root@ 192.168.1.231 From the workstation NUC proceed to follow instructions here: . You’ll install and init gcloud and kubectl. Next you’ll install the bmctl CLI tool. https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/bare-metal/1.6/quickstart#install-gcloud Proceed to follow instructions here: . We’ll create a hybrid cluster - a single cluster for both admin and workloads, that can also manage user clusters.(other options are standalone, admin, & user clusters). In the hybrid cluster deployment option, one of your NUCs will be the control plane node, the other will be the worker node. You can read more about the other deployment options on . https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/bare-metal/1.6/quickstart#create-cluster-nodes Creating clusters: overview Find a “block” of # of NUC contiguous IP addresses on your network. 3 or 4 IP addresses will be enough for the purposes of a POC. Whenever you create a K8s service of type “LoadBalancer”, one of these IP addresses will be consumed. I used 192.168.1.236-192.168.1.240. The “start” IP address (i.e. 192.168.1.236) you will specify as your ingressVIP in the YAML file. You should also find another free IP address for your controlPlaneVIP. It should NOT be in the start-end range discussed above. I used 192.168.1.196. Specify one of your NUC IP addresses as the IP address for the control plane node pool, and the other(s) right at the bottom of the YAML as the worker node pool. Run to perform preflight checks, and then to install Anthos. If you followed the instructions in step 22 then all APIs and service account keys would have been generated for you. ./bmctl create cluster -c [name of your cluster] Once it completes successfully you’ll be given the path to the kubeconfig to connect to your new cluster. [Optional] If you wish you can re-image your “workstation NUC” using the USB key, and add it as a worker node to your cluster kubectl -n my-cluster edit nodepool np1. Remember to copy your “baremetal” folder (and subfolders) off to somewhere else first (because you’ll need the kubeconfig file!). Running Your First Workload So now let’s deploy a simple “Hello world!” Kubernetes deployment and service. Let’s begin by setting our environment variable. puts the under . So, for instance, I called my cluster bm-cluster: KUBECONFIG bmctl KUBECONFIG bmctl-workspace/[your-cluster-name]/ export KUBECONFIG=$HOME/baremetal/bmctl-workspace/bm-cluster/bm-cluster-kubeconfig First let’s create a deployment YAML: apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: metrics
      department: sales
  replicas: template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: metrics
        department: sales
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: hello
        image: 3 "gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:2.0" Save the file (as my-deployment.yaml), and now apply it to our Anthos BM cluster: kubectl apply -f my-deployment.yaml Let’s check the deployment: kubectl get deploy You should see something like this: NAME            READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE my-deployment   3/3     3            3           30s Now let’s create a service of type LoadBalancer. Save the following YAML as my-service.yaml: apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app: metrics
    department: sales
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - port: targetPort: 80 8080 Now let’s apply it: kubectl apply -f my-service.yaml Now let’s validate it got created: kubectl get svc my-service You should see something like this: Notice how my-service's IP address (external-IP) got automatically drawn from the “range” we specified earlier. Now we can curl our service, and check that everything is working as it should: For me, I , and I see: curl 192.168.1.237 Hello, world! Version: 2.0.0 Hostname: my-deployment-68bdbbb5cc-mpftc Your Anthos on BM cluster is fully operational. It will also show up in the Google Cloud console. Congratulations! If you want to log in to your cluster (to view node and workload information from the console) you can now follow the instructions on . Logging in to a cluster from Cloud Console

How to Install Anthos Bare Metal on Intel NUCs: A Beginner's Guide

The Financial System Laid Bare [My Two Cents]

The story of how Serverless came to be. Serverless is a hot technology right now. However, what does it mean? The easiest way to define it is that it takes the “where” out of software deployment. To understand this concept a little more clearly, let’s look at the various ways in which software was deployed. ### The history of software deployment In the past, systems administrators would prepare physical servers for software to be deployed. This would involve installing the operating system, associated device drivers, making sure there was enough memory/disk/processor available, installing any prerequisites, etc. They would also take care of hardware upgrades and so forth. This is known as a “bare metal” environment. There is strong coupling between the physical hardware and the deployed software, since one strongly depends on the other. Here, the unit of deployment was an actual server. The next type of deployment to emerge was a virtual machine. Now, instead of deploying right to a given piece of hardware, developers were able to target a simulated server. This led to a lot of flexibility with upgrades and migrations, as well as not having to worry about small hardware variations. This made deployments a lot more repeatable and flexible. This also enabled system administrators to begin decoupling software from hardware. Now, if there was a hardware failure, a system administrator could migrate the virtual machine to different hardware and avoid issues. Systems administrators could also host more than one virtual machine on a given physical server. However, virtual machines still had some limitations and overhead. For better or for worse, they pretended to be actual servers and this wasn’t always needed. Here, the unit of deployment is the virtual machine. The follow-up to virtual machines was containerized deployment. Various containerization technologies like Docker, OpenVZ, LXC, FreeBSD zones and Solaris jails all emerged. These technologies enabled a system administrator to “section off” an operating system and have different applications running on the same system without them interfering with each other. It also let developers have a light-weight environment that closely matched the production environment, leading to more consistent operations between environments. Additionally, a lot of tooling has developed to ease creating and maintaining containers and many companies use this to improve their development and deployment cadence. Here, the unit of deployment is a container. You will notice in each of these paradigms, there is concept of “where” the software is executing, whether that’s on a physical server on-site, or on a VM on a cloud host. Serverless promises to give us another level of abstraction: the code itself. With this new level of abstraction, we don’t need to be as concerned “where” our code is hosted. The beginnings of Serverless Google released Google App Engine in 2008. For the first time, a developer was able to develop a program and launch it to run on Google’s cloud without having to be concerned with details like how the server was provisioned or if the operating system required patches. Amazon launched a similar service, Lambda in 2015. Now, developers could create software and not have to worry about hardware, operating system maintenance, scalability or locality. Although these are two of the bigger providers, there are a great number of serverless providers today, all supporting various technologies at different price points. Additionally, software is available for on-premises deployment for companies that don’t want to go to the cloud but want some additional flexibility. The developer experience Although there are a great number of variations on how the different Serverless platforms work, they typically follow a workflow like this: The software is developed and packaged following the guidelines of the chosen platform. Depending on the vendor, this may mean writing our software expressed as a JavaScript function, or it may even involve packaging it into a container. Once the package is created, it is uploaded to the serverless provider’s platform. The deployment is then live. The platform will decide when to create or destroy replicas of the software and will respond to increased load by creating more copies of the container or function. This type of workflow tends to be pretty popular with developers – they only need be concerned with the creation of the software and the Serverless provider takes care of the details. Conclusion The way software is delivered has continued to evolve, especially since the advent of affordable and reliable cloud hosting. Each new methodology brings new advantages as well as some disadvantages, so it’s best to be familiar with them all to enable yourself to select the most appropriate deployment method for a given project. Large deployments may find themselves needing to use a combination of these approaches. For example, it’s common for GPU compute to be done on bare-metal, instead of in a container or virtual machine. It is best to view these separate approaches as augmenting each other, rather than supplanting each other. As always, stay aware of project requirements and this will guide your hand in choosing the most efficient way to launch and maintain your software platform. Previously published on DashBird .

Once Upon a Time There Was Bare-Metal

By Andreea Jakab, Bigstep The need for high performance servers is greater than ever before and many companies are making the switch to dedicated servers, as they are beginning to learn that public cloud services are not as powerful as bare metal. Let’s look at the benefits of dedicated servers and how mid-sized companies can take advantage of them. Need for High Performance Servers We are experiencing a new tech-based society, where almost every business needs a high-performance server. According to an , nearly 80% of enterprise executives believe not embracing big data will make their companies less competitive and even raise the possibility of extinction. Accenture study This belief is rooted in the fact that every business must have quick, safe, and secure access to their data, not to mention maintain a functioning website. There are plenty of public cloud service providers out there. Many offer services that see to company data needs, but the truth is that virtual machines have more downsides than advantages. Downsides of Virtual Machines Virtual machines access hardware indirectly, which makes them far less efficient than real machines. Virtual machines also run software on top of the host operating system, which slows usability because it must request access to the hardware from the host. Performance is also hindered when several virtual machines run on the same host because they still use the resources of the host machine. The more powerful the host computer, the faster the virtual machine can operate. A virtual machine can also be infected by the host machine and potentially infect every machine in the environment. Complete Control and Exclusive Use A dedicated server is a physically isolated tool that provides businesses with complete control and exclusive use. As a single-tenant environment, you have root access to the server and exclusive use of all the CPU, RAM, and bandwidth, which means at peak business times you’ll continue to receive peak performance. Flexibility and Scalability If you are anticipating growth, then you need a dedicated server. With a dedicated server you’ll be able to customize your server arrays to fit your needs, including CPU, RAM, disk space, and software. Dedicated servers are also more scalable than public clouds - simply add more processing, storage, and backup as needed. Built for Speed Dedicated servers provide increased performance. No extra layers of processing between the operating system and requests for data means no built-in latency. Additionally, data streams within the dedicated environment are genuinely isolated, which means greater stability and reliability during peak traffic times. Unique IP Address A dedicated server also comes with a dedicated IP address which is beneficial for a variety of reasons: a boost in performance and security, direct server access, a higher level of server control, and increased email capabilities. Companies doing credit card processing (such as e-commerce) will find this especially important. Security One of the greatest benefits of a direct server is its enhanced security, especially for companies that perform transactions over FTP or SSL. The litany of cloud hacking cases show that public cloud service providers are not as secure as they claim. No matter the size of your business, you certainly can’t afford to have your company's sensitive data fall prey to hackers and data thieves. Dedicated servers like bare metal cloud solutions occupy the entire operating system, which makes it faster, safer, and at a lower likelihood of hacking and interference. Cost Predictability Though bare metal is generally more expensive than shared hosting, the predictability of a fixed price and the scalability of bare metal cloud is the right choice for any business. It’s good to know what you’re paying for and why you’re being charged. With a dedicated server, you simply pay for the services you use, unlike most public cloud providers who charge a nominal fee every time you attempt to access your data. These fees may be miniscule, but cloud providers charge them in hopes that high volume will balance out the low cost. Bare metal servers provide the processing infrastructure for the metal cloud's computational services. They offer unrivaled performance and complete out-of-band management. In fact, in a single-tenancy environment, bare metal servers outperform traditional on-premises solutions and public virtualized clouds in nearly every category. About the Author: Andreea Jakab serves as a Community Growth Manager for Bigstep ( https://bigstep.com/ ).

The Bare Facts: What Businesses Have to Gain with Dedicated Servers 

This manual explains how to install the most recent stable version of Ruby on Linux, without using or alternative version managers. The goal was to find a fast and reliable approach for provisioning expendable virtual machines for Rails development environment. rbenv Basic assumptions: Installation speed matters. Only one version of Ruby is required system-wide. We're using Ubuntu, or any other Debian-based Linux distribution. Step 1. Install prebuilt Ruby from Brightbox Notice the package that should be installed in addition to the primary one. It is required to build native extensions for Ruby gems. dev sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ruby2.6 ruby2.6-dev Brightbox manual proposes a tool called that can help to switch between multiple Rubies on the same system. Since there will be only one of them, this step is unnecessary. ruby-switch Step 2. Make gem work without sudo By default, will try to install new gems to the system folder (e.g. ), which is no good. Ruby version managers override this path with something under user home directory. But the same operation could be done manually. To permanently set target directory to the user home, and  these lines to your : gem /var/lib/gems/2.4.0 ~/.bashrc GEM_HOME= /.gem/ruby/2.6.0 PATH= /.gem/ruby/2.6.0/bin: export $HOME export $HOME $PATH Here is the most important thing you need to know about Ruby version managers to understand what exactly they do in system configuration: "RubyGems' default local repository can be overridden with the and environment variables. sets the default repository to install into. allows multiple local repositories to be searched for gems" — ( ) GEM_PATH GEM_HOME GEM_HOME GEM_PATH rubygems.org Step 3. Run a quick ad-hoc test Log into the shell, and execute these commands to ensure and binaries are available, gem home path is configured correctly, and native extensions could be built: gem ruby gem install bundler rails
rails new testapp cd Or just execute to see the paths without installing anything. gem env Here is a full to provision new Linux VM with Ruby development environment: Vagrantfile https://github.com/dreikanter/vagrant-rails Peace ✌️

Bare Metal Ruby

Have you ever wondered how much money a game developer makes? After all, the gaming industry is huge - it was valued at in revenue in 2019. Almost people from all over the world play video games. Game developers should be praised for these astonishing numbers, because they were the ones who made it happen by spending countless hours on development. But do they get rewarded for their hard work? Not at all. $151.9 billion 2.5 billion The sad truth is that the only people making money in the gaming industry are the large gaming companies and the platforms that distribute the games - Steam, the App Store, and Google Play. But right now, let’s take a closer look at Steam’s numbers. According to the official numbers, there were released on Steam in 2018. That’s an average of 25 games per day! It’s obvious that there must be some tools you can use to promote your game and make it stand out, right? Nope. Steam doesn’t offer any advertisement tools. You just release the game and Steam gets its cut, that’s it. So is there any alternative? 9,050 games Source: broadbandsearch.net We’ve already seen platforms like and trying to get a cut from Steam’s monopoly but, despite being around for a while, they are not even close to its current player base. That’s why we’ve decided to look into more different approaches from a technical standpoint. For example, blockchain as the underlying technology allows to lower costs for all market participants and to offer new and interesting ways to reward players and developers alike. Right now, there are several platforms that are taking advantage of blockchain’s benefits, such as , , or . Epic Games store GOG Ultra The Abyss Robot Cache In the hope to understand if blockchain could become a real competitor to Steam, in this article we've decided to stick with the EOS-based Ultra platform, as The Abyss and Robot Cache are more limited in options since they are niche projects: one aimed to MMO games, while the other comes as a solution to resell used games, respectively, but neither of which aim to be a direct competitor to Steam. Ultra, however, claims to become an enhanced Steam. With our research skills and reaching out to their team to get some questions answered, here’s our conclusion on whether using blockchain for game distribution benefits developers or not. The lifecycle of a game To develop a game, you don’t need anything other than a computer and your own skills. Maybe you'll need help from other people; for example, you may need artwork or character designs created by an artist, but let's suppose you do everything on your own. The problem is that you still have to pay the bills (like rent and electricity) while you're developing it. The of living in the USA is $20,194 per person per year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (yes, we also suppose that you're living in the US, but this number can be lower or higher depending on where you’re from). Now, a very important metric is how long it takes to develop a game. average cost Brian Clarke, of a AAA games, Warhammer Online terrain architect, and former Disney lead artist, has gone the route of developing independent games. He released a game called The Subject that took him to develop. It takes seven months for an experienced developer, but it can be a lot slower or a bit faster, ranging from for super casual games to one year, if not more. Even for bigger teams, development can take as long as , as is the case of the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. a former developer seven months 2 months 7 years Anyway, even if you develop your game for one year, you still have to cover thousands of dollars in expenses and you don't have any income yet. It’s okay if you have some savings, otherwise you might find yourself in the situation of desperately needing a job. It may help a lot, given that an average salary in the industry is higher than , but you’ll have less time to work on your game, thus taking you even longer before getting any income from your constant work. $50,000 The game is ready... now what? To launch a game, you have to pay to add it to Steam. It requires a $100 fee that will be returned if your game makes $1,000 (that would mean that Steam already made $300 on their 30% cut). As you can remember, there's another option - publishing your game on an alternative platform. It will cost nothing to publish the game on Ultra, which is handy, given that you still haven't made any money so far. paying Source: partner.steamgames.com Nowadays, it’s easier to publish the game than it was five years ago, as Steam opened its doors to all kinds of games, even ones. This inevitably resulted in Steam being too crowded; there’s plenty of low-quality games, but Steam gets its 30% cut from all of them regardless of if they even get a chance to be bought. We’re talking about chances because there’s hardly any marketing tools available on the platform, and many games don’t get any attention at all. controversial In an titled “Your indie game will flop and you will lose money,” the founder of talks about the chances of getting any coverage on gaming websites. He had 36 years of coding experience, shipped over a dozen games, several of which made millions of dollars, got into indie development very early, knew a lot of industry people, and had a relatively high public profile. And still, almost no one covered his latest game (in terms of gaming websites). article Positech Games Cliff Ski Marketing is very expensive nowadays. It can cost you around for branding, creating trailers, building social networks, a website, and doing public promotions. Other sources that a small game requires anywhere from €10,000 up to €80,000 spent on marketing in Europe. Keep in mind that you need to pay this money out of your pocket while you’re already paying your other expenses. What if you don’t have this kind of marketing money? $50,000 say That’s why, contrary to Steam, chooses to offer effective marketing tools to promote games. It has the ad toolbox that allows to target various users that might be interested in the game. Ultra More marketing, more sales, more money, right? On Steam, payouts may take up to 30 days. According to their official : “We payout by the 30th of the month following sales. For example, we will pay you for calendar February month sales by March 30th.” A very delayed salary. At the same time, the platform gets its share faster, right after processing the payment from the user. That doesn't seem even remotely fair. FAQ Ultra comes with instant payout for sold copies. Developers receive their portion of each transaction the moment the transaction occurs. Only 10% of the revenue is reserved for refunds, but this money also gets released after two months. This also allows developers to double down on that “more marketing” and drive sales momentum at launch by reinvesting in their campaigns directly from sales – all in real time. The fact of the matter is that to get money, you have to make sales. But here comes the most interesting part; how much money can you make after all this hard work? Steam gets its cut, but that doesn’t mean you’re making money Mike Rose, the indie publisher behind the downhill biking game , that in February 2018 around 850 games launched on Steam. That’s about 40 a day. About 82% of those didn’t even make American minimum wage. The money that came out of 82% of the games that came out on Steam would not support a single person’s expenses. Descenders says According to Rose's estimates of sales on Steam, once he removes games he thinks never had a chance of selling at all, the average game on Steam will sell about 2,000 copies and make $12,500 in revenue in its first month. The average game will make $30,000 in its first year. Let’s remove the 30% that Steam takes - that leaves us with only $21,000. If we cut taxes, that leaves us with a very grim, uninspiring number. Cliff Ski, who wrote the previous flop article, has an even worse estimation. The top indie game on Steam he looked at had over 3,500 owners, its top price at $9.99, and it’s been out for 9 months. The maximum conceivable income is $20,979 to the developer. That’s the revenue for the top indie game. Don’t forget to cut those 30% (Steam doesn’t forget it too). Only $14,685 is left, minus taxes. Brian Clarke, the developer of The Subject, $5,071 as revenue in the first four months, and after all cuts there was only $2,915 left in his pocket. Not that much for 7 months of work, right? earned Source: youtube.com/channel/UCLW3-wJ5le91XDe9iGTrpzQ Recently, Steam its fee policy. It takes 30% only from the first $10 million in sales. For all sales between $10 million and $50 million, the split goes to 25%. For every sale after the initial $50 million, Steam takes just a 20% cut. As we already know, an indie game won’t make it past $10 million, right? This policy is beneficiary for AAA games only; it doesn’t make any difference for small developers. There should be a change to let smaller developers make more.  As Mike Rose said, “I do think in the next couple years there's gotta be space for [another platform].” changed Well, here it is, the Ultra platform. They only take a 15% fee, and that means that any developer will be able to make 21% more just by listing their game on Ultra instead of Steam. Also, don’t forget about all the marketing tools and the instant payout. When you get no help from Steam, why stick with it? Placing your game on Ultra seems more like a win-win deal. It rewards developers fairly, it offers the same features, and it also rewards players with Ultra Coins, the native token on the platform, for all kinds of activities. Playing and streaming, watching ads, writing game reviews - all these actions get rewarded. Ultra could achieve Steam’s player base in no time. Large partnerships are on the way and with each collaboration millions of players are going to try it. Don’t you think that its unique rewards would incentivize players to stay? The long road ahead The gaming market has grown quickly. Even the largest platform, Steam, has only of the sales revenue of the industry. At the same time, only of gamers use their Steam account for playing and that number is decreasing. There’s a lot of room to grow for any decent gaming platform, and a new platform might take its share of the market quickly. 14% 31% Source: twitter.com/Steam_Spy The most important thing is providing developers with the opportunity to receive their fair share of their hard-earned money and providing them with the tools to promote games without feeling that they work for an evil corporation that mistreats them. Let’s not demonize Steam here, as they also do their job of providing people with a platform for entertainment, but Ultra shows us that there might be an alternative for developers to earn more. Let’s hope for the best!

Barely Surviving as a Game Developer (While Steam Still Gets their Cut)

Apenas sobreviviendo como desarrollador de juegos (mientras que Steam todavía obtiene su parte)

Migrating from bare-bones Envoy to Istio This post is part of the “Service Mesh” series. If you haven’t read the previous posts, I would urge you to do so, it will help understand this article better. Here are the previous articles Service Mesh with Envoy 101 Microservices monitoring with Envoy Service Mesh, Prometheus & Grafana Distributed Tracing with Envoy Service Mesh & Jaeger In the previous articles we looked at installing Envoy as a side car proxy to our services and saw how the Service Mesh setup helped in managing traffic between the services and to collect and visualise tons of telemetry data about the traffic. There were a few annoying things in the setup though Installing the Envoy side car manually Routing traffic to the side car proxy manually Managing the configurations for all the Envoy side cars Regarding #3, as we saw already in one of the previous posts, we can use Envoy’s xDS server to manage the configuration in a central way and update them dynamically without needing a restart. Yes, this reduces the pain to a level, but still you have to maintain the configuration for all the side car proxies. Data Plane vs Control Plane Before improving our setup, we need to understand these terms which are widely used in a service mesh context. Data Plane is the one which actually does all the ground work like routing traffic, collecting telemetry and sending to the metrics store(e.g.: statsd), managing traffic with circuit breaking, rate limiting, etc.. An example of Data Plane would be our Envoy side car. Control Plane is the one which configures the side car proxies in the service mesh. Till now and configuring the side car proxies, but we can use a tool which will act as a Control Plane and configure our side car proxies for us. Example of a Control Plane is Istio. we were acting as a Control Plane manually Istio Control Plane So now you don’t directly configure any side car proxies, we submit our configurations(traffic shifting, fault injection, etc.. )to the config store, Istio Pilot(a component in Istio) looks for changes in the config store and then pushes these changes to the side car proxies. Note: The above diagram shows only Istio Pilot, but Istio has several other components like Citadel, Galley, etc… Demo Let’s look at an example of setting up a Service Mesh with Istio. We will deploy our services in a Kubernetes cluster Service Architecture Installing Istio Pre-requisites: You need to have a Kubernetes cluster up and running Have Helm client and tiller configured in your cluster. Refer here Clone the official Istio repo kubectl apply -f install/kubernetes/helm/istio/templates/crds.yaml helm install install/kubernetes/helm/istio -name istio -namespace istio-system Note: Am using Helm version v2.9.1 and the Kubernetes cluster is in GKE. You can find installation instruction for other environments . here Deploying the Services When we were dealing with only Envoy, we had to manually route the requests to the side car. This time we would not do that, we would let Istio do the magic. The source code of the services can be found . Nothing special, just a service calling a couple of other services. Also there is no Envoy configuration for each service, Istio will take care of the side car configurations. Service A while calling Service B and Service C, uses the Kubernetes service name, “serviceb.serviceb” and “servicec.servicec” respectively here We are creating Kubernetes namespaces for our services and we are adding a special label to each namespace, we will discuss why that is necessary shortly. We are managing our applications with helm and you can find the helm charts for the applications in the same under the “helm” directory . If everything went well, your pods should be up and running repository service pods running If you watch closely there are two containers(in each pod) running for every service, but in our helm chart definition we had only one container defined. This happened because Istio watches over all the deployments and adds the side car container to our pods.This is achieved by leveraging what is called , this feature was introduced in Kubernetes 1.9. So before the resources get created, the web hook intercepts the requests, checks if “Istio injection” is enabled for that namespace, and then adds the side car container to the pod. So that is how Istio solves the problem of manually adding a side car proxy to each of our services. MutatingAdmissionWebhooks Note: Namespace labels is not the only way to add the side car, you can even use the “istioctl” command line tool to generate the specification and deploy Next we create a Ingress rule to route traffic to Service A. and are Kubernets CRDs(Custom Resource Defnitions) created when we installed Istio. We will see more about these in the next post, for now just understand that we are asking all requests to be routed to Service A. Gateway VirtualService Let’s hit the gateway’s public ip to generate some traffic. You can find the external ip of your gateway by kubectl get services istio-ingressgateway -n istio-system We can use any load testing tool to generate some traffic, am using hey hey -z 30s http://x.x.x.x Istio comes with tools to monitor what is going on in the service mesh, let us look at Kiali and Grafana. Note: When we installed Istio with Helm, tools like Grafana, Prometheus, Zipkin, Kiali, etc.. would have been automatically installed. You can control what is installed and their configurations by modifying the values . file Kiali kubectl port-forward service/kiali -n istio-system 20001:20001 Kiali service mesh visualisation Grafana kubectl port-forward service/grafana -n istio-system 3000:3000 Grafana metrics As you can see, we have our Service Mesh with Istio setup and we have all the metrics and visualisations. But a thing to note is . Istio uses IP Table rules to route incoming and outgoing traffic to side car proxies first. More details about the rules . we did not manually route traffic to the side car proxies, it automagically happened here Configuring Istio We saw that you don’t directly configure the side car proxies with Isito. So how do we configure traffic control rules? For this purpose when you install Istio a lot of Kubernetes CRDs (custom resource definitions) are created, E.g: , … We see an example of a configuration to controlling traffic below: VirtualService DestinationRule The above rule is an example of doing canary deployment, routing 10% traffic to the new version of the service. So we submit these rules to the config store, Istio Pilot watches the store and pushes the configuration changes to the appropriate side car proxies. Conclusion With Istio, there is literally no code change that the service developer has to do to get all the benefits of a Service Mesh. They can instead concentrate on building business features. In fact, the developer wouldn’t even know that there is a Service Mesh setup. This post was just to see how migrating to Istio solves some of the annoying issues we had with Envoy. And that is why we didn’t delve deeper into Istio. Istio is much bigger and has many more things to it. In the next post we will explore more about Istio. You can find all the code . I gave a talk on this topic which you can find here here _Contribute to dnivra26/istio_101 development by creating an account on GitHub._github.com dnivra26/istio_101

Service Mesh: Moving from bare-bones Envoy to Istio

A look at what you need to build a website for your business, including the possible costs. There comes a time where most business owners may feel that an online presence will be needed to further grow their business, especially with B2C (Business-to-Customer) ventures. The problem is that a lot of business owners do not understand what is needed to build and launch a website. The more tech savvy business owners may decide to take a DIY approach to launching a website whereas the less tech savvy may prefer to hire a website developer. Example: Online Store If, for example you decided to hire a developer to build your online store the costs can vary depending on complexity, anywhere from $3,000 to over $100,000. A basic e-commerce website can cost anywhere from $2,000 — $3,000, with more complex online stores costing over $4,000. Enterprise level e-commerce sites can cost anywhere from $20,000 — $40,000 on the cheap end and over $100,000 on the higher end. Again, complexitiy will be the main deciding factor in the cost of an online store but let’s look at the minimum needed for an e-commerce site. Websites that do not have e-commerce/online payments functionality usually cost less, again depending on complexity. Note: What you need for a business website: The Essentials Domain Name: This is where your website will “live”, a domain name looks like this “ ” or “ ”. yourwebsitename.com www.yourwebsitename.com Website Hosting: This service makes your website accessibile via the internet, it keeps your website online. Think of your domain name as an address and your web hosting provider as the house that your website lives in. For example, if John Doe lives at 123 Address Street, you know where to go to find him. Now what if you go to his address and find nothing there? Where can someone live in if they don’t have a house? Same way, a website can have a domain name (an address) but it still needs web hosting (a house) so people can see the site when they get there. That is why you need a web hosting provider after getting a domain name and you can usually get these services in the same place. E-mail Provider: Next you will need an email provider that will allow you to send and recieve emails using your domain name. For example you can send and recieve emails as: “info@yourwebsitename.com” or “enquiries@yourwebsitename.com”. Usually you can get e-mail, web hosting and a domain from the same place. The following providers offer these services together: Bluehost Hostgator WPEngine The Core Content Management System (CMS): This is the core of your website, the place where your website will be built, where all the content will be uploaded and where the website and business will be managed. Examples of a CMS include: WordPress Magento Shopify Pros & Cons of each CMS: WordPress — High flexibility and lower costs. Shopify — The most simple but the least flexible. Magento — The most flexible but also the most expensive and complex CMS. Products: These are the products you will sell, each product will need their own product page that includes photos and information about the product. Inventory Management System: If you plan to ship the products yourself you can use your CMS to manage your inventory or you can use a fufilment centre which will store, pack and ship your products for a fee. Most good fufilment centres have software that intergrates with the most popular CMS’s, so you can still use WordPress for example to manage your orders if you use a fufilment centre. If your chosen fufilment centre does not have software that intergrates with your chosen CMS then you can use the fufilment centre’s website or their own software and then have the inventory data linked to your website. External Fufilment Centres you can use: Shipwire Fufilment By Amazon FedEx Fufilment ShipMonk What else does an e-commerce site need? You will need to enable online payments for your site, you can use PayPal, a Payment Gateway (like Stripe) or both. You can even use Bitcoin. You will also need a customer login portal where they can create an account and view orders. These are the bare minimum you need for a competitive e-commerce site in 2018 and once you know the time that goes into implenting and testing these features, then you can see how the costs add up so quickly. For example, an Enterpise level Magento website will cost you $22,000 a year and that is just for the CMS itself. This is why I reccomend business owners to start off with WordPress since it has a high level of flexibilty and is more than enough for a lot of websites, the PayPal website itself was built using WordPress! The only con with WordPress is the fact that it still requires skill to build a competitive website, which is why you may want to ask a professional to do it for you instead. If you need a professional to build your site, you can request a free quote from our web deisgn agency: Request A Free Quote: Litework Design If you want more information about domain names, web hosting and e-mail providers, we can give you reccomendations based on your needs: Domain, Web Hosting & E-mail Providers: Contact Us | Litework Design

The Bare Minimum You Need for Your Business’s Website

Josh talks about how he took Baremetrics from idea to over $1M in ARR, as well as the 50+ projects/businesses he has built over the past 15 years. Davis Baer : What is Baremetrics, and how long have you been working on it? : is a revenue growth platform. We provide analytics and growth tools for subscription companies. I started it in 2013 initially to scratch my own itch and it quickly grew past a little side project in to something that’s been used by thousands of businesses and now does over $1M a year in revenue. Josh Pigford Baremetrics I saw that you live in Alabama. Is that where you grew up? I grew in Mississippi then lived in Colorado for a while and ultimately ended up in Alabama when my wife and I had our first kid. All of our family is in in the southeast so moved here to be closer to them. I don’t know that growing up Mississippi itself shaped me any differently than anywhere else would have. I was a typical suburban kid who lived in a quiet neighborhood and spent a ton of time outside playing, exploring and building things. I think that freedom to explore and build things shaped me more than anything, which really is a testament to my parents. Them trusting me and allowing me to do those things fostered a pretty deep love and desire to always explore and build. What did you do prior to Baremetrics? I’ve been mostly self-employed for nearly 15 years. I started building things on the web in the late 90’s and started making money on the web in the early 00’s. Since then that have led to where I am with Baremetrics today. I’ve started 50+ projects/businesses Directly preceding Baremetrics were a couple of SaaS products in the survey space, but I’ve dabbled in everything from ecommerce to social networks to SaaS products and everything in between. Did you do anything to validate the initial idea before building Baremetrics? Not a single thing. It started as this little internal tool that I needed and as I started talking to some other founders about it most of them immediately wanted to use it as well. So, I took I basically just took the internal tool and put a logo and credit card form on it and that was the first version. Here is the Baremetrics revenue analytics report of… Baremetrics. How did you find your first few customers, and what have been your growth channels since? The first 100 customers all came from word-of-mouth via Twitter. I was essentially live-tweeting my process as I got the first version out the door and that brought in those first customers pretty easily. Back in 2013 there was nobody else doing “Stripe analytics” but Stripe was really taking off then, so there was a lot of demand and a perfect opportunity for me to step in an offer something. Since then we’ve expanded outside of Stripe to other platforms and data sources and provide a whole lot more than just analytics, but being hyper-focused on “Stripe” served us amazingly well in the early days. Since then most of our growth comes from content marketing. I saw on Twitter that you are working on some side projects. What can you tell us about that? I’m a habitual maker. I’ve always got sort of random side project going. I thrive on learning how to do new things and get bored extremely quickly if I’m not exploring new ideas. Hobbies and side projects are a way for me to sort of facilitate that desire to always learn new things. some As of today I’m working on a , , and …all in addition to running Baremetrics. Yes, I have a problem. 😉 handmade home goods shop a music simulation game a new music notification service a maker show What’s your advice for entrepreneurs who are just starting out? Do your best to start charging right away. Money is a fantastic validator as it can’t be masked with nice words. People will either pay you or they won’t. The longer you wait to charge for your product, the longer it will take to get meaningful feedback. The value of the feedback from free users is, on a certain level, commiserate with the amount they’re paying you…zero. What’s a book that you recommend every entrepreneur read? The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Lots of entrepreneurs get stuck in their head and become their own biggest barrier. Where can we go to learn more? I’m far too active on Twitter, so you can definitely fine me there . If you’ve got a subscription company, would love to help you grow! @Shpigford Baremetrics This interview is brought to you by , a tool to schedule and automatically repeat your posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google My Business OneUp

Founder Interviews: Josh Pigford of Baremetrics

Cause without the underlying technology, this market wouldn’t exist The Current State of the Crypto Market Over the last several months, the crypto market has degenerated into a speculative mania nightmare. When we wrote the first draft of this essay, the global crypto market cap was $750 billion. The market tanked to $435 billion by the time we finished our second draft. After some feedback and friends ripping the essay apart, the market cap recovered to $535 billion. This was in a span of 48 hours. It now sits at $500 billion at time of publishing. The speculation we’ve seen over the past year was partially driven by people finally beginning to understand blockchain’s revolutionary value: a tool to decentralize and democratize many of our world’s underlying institutions, including the financial system, our government, and many others. However, an even larger part of it, the dark side of it, was the insane, opportunistic, FOMO-driven money grabs. It’s fun to play the market sometimes, especially in a bull market where seemingly every coin increases 10x. But that’s just it, a bull market; it makes everyone look like geniuses. Many of us were able to capitalize immensely on the mania, but with the market turning into something disturbing, it’s vital we keep bringing it back to its roots: the message and philosophy behind why Bitcoin was created. What was once a tool to decentralize and democratize our financial system, has turned into multiple platforms and communities of cults looking for “the next Bitcoin.” As far as the current market goes, every coin from #2 to #1200, will be the next Bitcoin according to each coin’s subreddit. Let’s start by identifying some of the most pressing problems with the current market. We are sure this isn’t an exhaustive list but we are currently focused on the market psychology. We will address other issues in this space in later essays. Buzz… Buzz… Buzz… Buzzwords are, by far, one of the most damaging trends in this space and there are a lot more than just “blockchain.” Offhand, we can think of “Decentralized,” “ASIC Resistance,” “Community Governance,” “Masternodes,” “Ethereum Killer,” “Next Generation of Blockchain,” “Next Evolution of Blockchain,” “(I Read The) Whitepaper,” “(Color)paper,” “Market Cap,” “The Real Bitcoin,” “New Paradigm,” “Roadmap,” “FUD,” etc. Words, in general, are tools to express ideas that have underlying concepts. All these buzzwords have meaning, but the way they become “buzz” words is when they are used without having consideration or understanding of that meaning. Let’s take “roadmap” as an example, because everybody has one and it’s easy to assume that whoever made it knows what they’re talking about. (They probably don’t.) How do roadmaps actually get made? Simply — some people make some lofty assumptions on top of other lofty assumptions and “if absolutely everything goes right in the next 2 years, we will be .” That’s it. here There is a joke in the software engineering space that if you are asked to put a deadline on something, use the first date that pops up in your head and add eight months to it. Usually, you’re working with proven technologies in general software engineering. But even those roadmaps fall short. They cannot account for changes in technology, market conditions, people’s preferences, new innovations, budget changes, etc. That’s why roadmaps should be viewed as living documents — they get updated as conditions change. We are just at the cusp of blockchain technology. Teams are making roadmaps that have no precedent, on unproven technologies, and assuming they will invent things when they said they will (but that, of course, is not how inventions work). If this doesn’t terrify you, it should. Don’t fall for the hype; don’t get caught up in the “buzz” while the waters are muddy. Remember that many people will become millionaires off the backs of those who fall for buzzwords. It is the duty of investors (and all of us) to identify buzzwords being thrown at us and evaluate their claims. In the case of a roadmap, we need to ask ourselves, based on proper research, “Is this just a marketing ploy?” Do You Really Need a Blockchain For That? “X, but on the blockchain” (Sounds oddly familiar to “The Uber for X,” doesn’t it?) has turned into a common marketing pitch as there’s now seemingly endless coins for every use case imaginable where “traditional” solutions would more than suffice. You have to ask yourself: do they really need the blockchain? How does it improve upon the current infrastructure? To oversimplify, the blockchain is a distributed database, which means it goes to great, inefficient, expensive pains to make sure everyone in the network agrees on one version of the truth. It’s not easy, but it has certain values that make it worth the hassle, like censorship resistance and trustless protocols. However, very few things actually need these properties. The vast majority of use cases out there will be just fine using a traditional database that’s cheaper, faster, and easier to use. The blockchain is not a one size fits all solution, as you can see by the scalability challenges we’re currently facing, and much of the mania can be addressed if, before investing, everyone asked themselves “Do you really need a blockchain for that or is it some buzzword being thrown around for a cash grab?” Broken Marketing to Market Nothing Because the waters are so muddy with buzzwords and terrible use cases, the crypto market has degenerated into one marketing behemoth. How many of the coins in the top 20, let alone top 100, actually have products that work or products at all? Some of these coins are worth billions of dollars for products that don’t even exist yet. It really makes us miss teams that developed Minimum Viable Products (which is, ironically, another phrase that was buzzed and abused for years) that at least tried to create something of value before becoming billionaires. Right now, we are dealing with unprecedentedly low standards; the Minimum Viable Product is a template-marketplace-purchased website bought for $20, a bot-filled subreddit and Twitter account, and flashy words with a downloadable “whitepaper” that probably took less effort to create than a paper for a throwaway class in high school. Many people in this space like to say, “It’s a new paradigm and the old rules don’t apply anymore.” Wrong. The old rules are the ones that apply most because they have withstood the test of time. Let’s take supply and demand, a rule which often gets lost in the crypto mania. This rule will always apply unless there’s an unlimited amount of money (meaning you’re the Fed or started an Infinite Coin ICO that prints coins as you use them), so just because some coin is speculated to be listed on Coinbase doesn’t mean it will rocket to Bitcoin-like prices. When Ripple was rumored to be next, Twitter was full of folks thinking it’ll go up to Bitcoin all time high prices, despite Ripple’s huge circulating supply (and even larger non-circulating supply). That’s just not how it works. When calculating market cap (current circulating supply x current (or projected) price), ask yourself if your hypothetical target price has any basis in reality. Does the current price even have any basis in reality? Another simple rule we’re ignoring is that price is ultimately determined by value and the market constantly looks for the best way to accurately judge that value and assign a commensurate price. We are in that special phase where the value determination methodology has not yet been identified and therefore no one actually knows how to measure it. Everyone’s just making it up as they go along. And while it’s your job to discover the right valuation methodology for yourself, marketers have made it their job to twist your methods to serve their needs. Believe the marketing and drink the kool aid, and every coin sounds like the best coin the world when you first start reading about it. If you dig a little deeper, and move beyond the buzz, you might just find hot air. Unless you’re a (very) brave venture capitalist, those are “projects” you should probably avoid. Technology Last Or Not At All Collapsing the previous points, the technology has seemingly taken a backseat. The technology is the what makes this market exist in the first place. But with Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, everyone is more worried about finding their own Bitcoin in some overly marketed coin rather than the technology behind what drives this space, which is arguably the most important thing. Do we know about the consequences of widespread adoption? Do we know how are we going to get there? Do we know the work that went into the creation of the blockchain? What obstacles stand in our way? What is feasible and what is not? These are some of the questions people should care about, but don’t. People have attached themselves to the idea of “the next Bitcoin” or “the next Ethereum” so that each subreddit has seemingly become its own cult, ignoring any kind of technological feasibility. Please remember, these technologies are extremely new and mostly unproven. Bitcoin is considered “old” especially with how long it has been around. Look at some of the turmoil it is going through right now. The technology works, but is currently unscalable and can’t handle widespread adoption yet. All these new coins are promising you the world, with free, instant, secure transactions that can do everything everyone else can do, but better. Can they? I’ll let you in on a little computer science secret; there’s no such thing as a “free” transaction, there are only trade offs: speed, security, decentralization, censorship resistance, privacy, cost, and others. You cannot have it all. This market is not just a “market” — it exists because of the technology and in the end, the ones with the real working products will be left standing. Avoid the mania; put technology first. Bringing Blockchain Back to Basics Why Does This Even Exist? The answer to this question is at the heart of the market, of the technology, and of all the people working to turn it into reality. It’s cool to think about all the possible use cases (see: Do you really need a blockchain for that?), but we think it’s time we take a step back and re-establish the bare basics. : “ ” From the first sentence of the abstract of the original Bitcoin whitepaper A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. : “ .” From the introduction of the original Bitcoin whitepaper What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party Why would we not want to rely on third parties to settle our transactions? Hasn’t it been this way forever? Our entire world is based on trust. We have to trust the government to use government-backed FIAT currencies. We have to trust various third party intermediaries to act in our best interests. We have to trust to live, but to steal a cliche, trust is a hard thing to build and something that is very easy to break. It wasn’t an accident or coincidence that Bitcoin came out in the middle of the Great Recession and World Financial Crisis, a time in which governments and third party intermediaries proved that they could not be trusted. Satoshi Nakamoto’s big idea was simply to take the words “have to trust” out of the equation by building trust into the system’s foundation using cryptographic proof, thereby making it “trustless.” The study of cryptography is the ability to send messages privately without third parties (or the public) being able to read or intercept these messages, guaranteeing privacy and preserving data integrity. Fewer instances of companies selling our personal and transaction data to the highest bidder or forcing targeted advertisements upon us. Fewer cases like in 2012 when Target was allegedly able to correctly identify a teenage girl’s pregnancy from buying habits. Fewer breaches of trust. At its core, the blockchain allows people and machines to work together without having to trust each other. This is what it’s all about. As you look at today’s manic market, keep that constantly in mind. Avoid the buzz words and marketing, question the need for blockchains, focus on the underlying technology, and always come back to its roots. Let this be the re-beginning of our journey into the blockchain world. We’ve established the bare basics of what the current market is and why Bitcoin was created. In some of the coming essays, we will take a deep dive into the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers, thoroughly examine the pros and cons of different consensus algorithms, and analyze existing cryptoassets. What the Hell Happened During the Creation of this Essay? The cryptomarket moves very quickly. We have compiled a non-exhaustive list of events that have happened in the creation of this essay. This is no particular order. India Bitcoin Regulation: Suspending Exchange Accounts South Korea Regulation: South Korea Prohibits Crypto Trading from Anonymous Bank Accounts CBOE Futures Settle A Cryptocurrency Rating System Possible First Transaction on the Lightning Network? References and Further Readings Bitcoin Whitepaper : Coincenter Do You Really Need a Blockchain for That? : IEEE Do You Need a Blockchain? How Target Figured Out a Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did Credit Hacker Noon Parea Viktor Bunin: Viktor@parea.io Henry Savit: Twitter Richard Vo: Richard@parea.io Errata We are only human and we make mistakes. We will include any types of revisions or lapses in logic when found or brought up to us in a dedicated section at the end of each of our essays. In addition, if you have any suggestions for future essays such as formatting, or topics you’d like to see written about discussed, drop us an email at hello@parea.io or leave us a comment.

Bringing Blockchain Back to the Bare Basics

Until recently, Kubernetes did not have the native support for load balancing for the bare metal clusters. is the new solution, currently in alpha version, aiming to close that gap. MetalLB As of now, Kubernetes comes with Network LB solution, which is actually a glue code calling for various IaaS cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). However, deploying Kubernetes on anything but the supported platforms (like a private cloud or a bare metal cluster) resulted in service objects with spec.type=LoadBalancer to remain in Pending status forever. Thus said, going for bare metal clusters left Kubernetes administrators with the choice between Nodeport and ExternalIPs, none of which was a perfect solution. MetalLB, a new load balancer offers a Network LB implementation that works on top of standard network equipment. MetalLB prerequisites and requirements The prerequisites for MetalLB stable operation include: A clean cluster version 1.8.0 or above, without any other load balancing solution installed Kubernetes One or several routers working with 4-byte AS numbers ( ) BGP RFC 6793 A bundle of IPv4 addresses for the routers to assign Here are more details of the . As MetalLB project will surely evolve, please refer to the for explanations. requirements maturity page You can test the self-contained minikube MetalLB functionality by following this . To deploy this tool to a production cluster, please head to the and guides. This detailed will help you get the tool up and running in no time. tutorial installation usage design document In case you wish to take part in the project evolution — please follow this for technical info. Any will make the MetalLB developers very happy, so feel free to share your thoughts and ideas! hacking guide usage feedback and suggestions Previously I’ve posted this article in my company’s blog: https://itsvit.com/blog/metallb-load-balancer-bare-metal-kubernetes-clusters/

MetalLB: a load balancer for bare metal Kubernetes clusters

After painstakingly writing out a naive implementation of a Sudoku solver on the whiteboard, local software engineer Mackenzie Beth was horrified to find no eraser in the room when she heard her interviewer say the dreaded words: “Okay, now let’s optimize this.” “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” Beth muttered under her breath as she began scrubbing away the code, her interviewer looking on placidly. After wiping her palm against her previously pristine white t-shirt, she continued, “Look, I’m not saying that whiteboard interviews are an abomination against the very essence of coding itself. But,” she said, holding up a hand completely covered in red marker, “you have to admit this is the stuff of nightmares.” At press time, sources report that Beth had taken to crying “Out, damned spot!” in her sleep while rubbing at a blank whiteboard.

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