Mete Atamel

After my time in Beijing, I flew back to the UK but instead of London, I went to Manchester for IPExpo conference. The first time I visited Manchester was 20 years ago. I was a 15 year old high school kid and I visited my great aunt and uncle one summer with my sister. I remember I had such a good time back then.

Unfortunately, I never had a chance to visit Manchester again and it was quite nostalgic for me to be back. I was hoping that I would remember Manchester a little bit but to my surprise, it was like a brand new city to me.

Visiting a new country is always extra special for me and a couple of weeks ago, I got to do just that and visited Beijing, China for the first time.

After TDC in Floripa, I flew to Beijing for QCon conference and for a Google Developer Group (GDG) meetup. It was the first time for me in China (my 48th country!) and first time speaking at QCon, so I was naturally excited. I didn’t know what to expect in Beijing but I was pleasantly surprised. Beijing is a modern city with good public transportation and interesting sites to visit. I got the feeling that it’s also very international with many expats, definitely more than I expected. I visited the iconic sites like Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China. I also visited Google’s Beijing office (my 35th Google office visit!)

Last week, I was in my favorite country, Brazil, for The Developer Conference (TDC) in Florianópolis (aka Floripa). I went to Brazil for the first time last July. Since then, I’ve been there 3 more times and I gradually fell in love with it. People are friendly, their BBQ is amazing, scenery is beautiful. I always have a good time in Brazil and this time wasn’t an exception.

In all previous times, I was mainly in Sao Paulo for a conference followed by a short trip to Rio (my favorite city!) for myself. This time, I went to Florianópolis which is a city to the south of Sao Paulo. It has a similar feeling as Rio (i.e. beach town) but smaller and felt safer than Rio. It had amazing views of mountains and sea, great food and friendly people, as always the case with Brazil.

As part of my Istio 101 talk, I like to show demos locally (because conference Wifi can be unreliable) and Minikube is perfect for this. Minikube gives you a local Kubernetes cluster on top of which you can install Istio.

In this post, I want to show how to do Istio 101 on Minikube. More specifically, I will show how to install Istio, deploy a sample application, install add-ons like Prometheus, Grafana, Zipkin, ServiceGraph and change traffic routes dynamically.

Last week, I was in one of my favorite cities, Rome, for Codemotion conference. There are many cities to see in the world and normally, I do not like to revisit cities that I’ve been before. However, Rome is a great exception. It was my fifth visit there over the years and it was still as exciting as the first time. I also found out that Google has a small office in Rome, so I paid a quick visit next morning before attending the conference.

Container virtualization is a rapidly evolving technology that can simplify how you deploy and manage distributed applications. When people discuss containers, they usually mean Linux-based containers. This makes sense, because native Linux kernel features like cgroups introduced the idea of resource isolation, eventually leading to containers as we know them today.

For a long time, you could only containerize Linux processes, but Microsoft introduced support for Windows-based containers in Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10. With this, you can now take an existing Windows application, containerize it using Docker, and run it as an isolated container on Windows. Microsoft supports two flavors of Windows containers: Windows Server and Hyper-V. You can build Windows containers on either the microsoft/windowsservercore and microsoft/nanoserver base images. You can read more about Windows containers in the Microsoft Windows containers documentation.

I’ve been recently looking into Istio, an open platform to connect and manage microservices. After Containers and Kubernetes, I believe that Istio is the next step in our microservices journey where we standardize on tools and methods on how to manage and secure microservices. Naturally, I was very excited to get my hands on Istio.

While setting up Istio on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is pretty straightforward, it’s always useful to have a local setup for debugging and testing. I specifically wanted to setup Istio on my local Minikube Kubernetes cluster on my Windows machine. I ran into a few minor issues that I want to outline here in case it is useful to someone out there.

When I’m playing with Kubernetes, I usually get a cluster from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) because it’s literally a single gcloud command to get a Kubernetes cluster up and running on GKE. It is sometimes useful though to have a Kubernetes cluster running locally for testing and debugging. Minikube is perfect for this.

Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your laptop. There are instructions on how to install it on Linux, Mac and Windows. Unfortunately, instructions for Windows is a little lacking, so I want to document how I got Minikube up and running on my Windows 10 machine.

I don’t get to visit this many new places in this short amount of time usually but last week I got to visit 4 cities in 4 countries. The amazing thing was that I had never been to any of these cities or countries before!

My journey started in Copenhagen, Denmark on Monday. I had been in all countries around Denmark but not in Denmark itself, so I was happy to finally add Denmark to the list of visited countries. I had to work on Monday, so I paid a visit the Google office in Copenhagen. This was my the 27th Google office I ever visited 🙂

October 10 was Ada Lovelace Day, a special day to celebrate women in science, technology, engineering and maths. Unfortunately, there are not enough women in software engineering and technology in general. Programs like Women Techmakers do a good job to encourage more women participation in technology with meetups, conferences and hackathons. One of those conferences, Tech(k)now Day, happened in London on Ada Lovelace Day and I was happy that Google Cloud was a sponsor. We had a booth and I was there with other Googlers answering questions. I also gave a talk on Containers and Kubernetes to a small group of 30+ people.