• 3 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Hey there! And thank you for reading.

    Let’s take your example, as a Nomad cluster operator. The Acme Corporation may have a team for provisioning and maintaining this Nomad cluster. The organization wants to give customers the option for self-service. As a Nomad cluster operator on the Nomad team, because you are empowered with agency and visibility, you get to think of creative solutions to the problem of self-service. The billing team? They’re doing that too. And your two teams may collaborate. But the onus is on you to be creative and work within your skillset to best deliver.

    Maybe you decide to go sit with the billing team for a week to understand the provisioning flow from the moment a customer presses pay to the automatic creation of a new Nomad cluster. Because you are empowered, you act. You’re happier because you don’t have to go through seven layers of command to be effective.

    Does that help?











  • Now that I’ve finished the first draft of an article on setting up rootless Podman on Guix System, I’m using and building out a set of tools to support a new article covering an all Red Hat stack from inner loop to CI.

    So far, it’s

    • OpenShift for the platform services run on
    • Podman for my local container engine
    • Podman Compose for inner loop development
    • OpenShift Pipelines for CI
    • Shipwright for building container images locally with Buildah
    • Quay for image scanning and storage
    • OpenShift Serverless for scale-to-zero deployments

  • Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, “cruft” accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.

    Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as “immutable”. Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don’t leave the system in an inconsistent state.

    What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.

    Is that helpful at all? There’s also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.


  • Because it uses OCI images, it auto-updates like a Chromebook, and you can switch between modes, like say a gaming mode that’s a full SteamOS replacement, to a mode that gives you an entire development environment without needing to install and configure these layers or stacks of capabilities yourself.

    That’s very powerful. For cloud native developers like myself who are used to working with container images as the deliverable artifact, this makes that workflow very easy. Podman is included. You can create entire development environments at will that are totally “pure”: no side effects because everything you need is in the container. That’s a Dev Container.