A mixed bag of new and older things. I haven’t been paying as much attention to things lately so I missed out on writing about some of them. This week comes with Kubernetes Draft, AWS Codestar, and Delicious' (last) acquisition.

Kubernetes Draft

Last week Brendan Burns from Microsoft Azure (and co-founder of Kubernetes) announced Draft. Draft is a new tool for helping you set up your first containers within a Kubernetes cluster and get it up and running quickly and without a lot of hassle.

About two weeks ago I was at Container Camp¹ and one of the common refrains there was that: 1. Kubernetes was the best thing since sliced bread, and 2. Kubernetes is a bit too hard to get started with. While obviously the first of those needs to be taken with a grain of salt, it’s that second point that Draft seems to address.

Making use of things like Helm Charts and project templates, Draft can create a Dockerfile for your application and subsequently deploy it on a Kubernetes cluster. Of course, it’s still in the early stages but the examples work well and show a lot of promise. It’s unlikely to be used for managing a more complex infrastructure, at least in the short term, but as judged by its name that’s not the goal here anyway.

Draft is very much aimed at quickly getting something up and running on your infrastructure in order to test if it works. Afterwards you can then set it up properly in your CI/CD pipeline for proper deployments, but having a way to quickly get something up and running on your infrastructure is a good thing and definitely something that should be strived for.

AWS CodeStar

In a sense related to Kubernetes Draft, about a month and a half ago AWS released CodeStar. As it happened during my holiday I didn’t get around to discussing it yet, but after mentioning Draft I had to think about this similar product that is focused on helping you get started with running your application on AWS infrastructure.

There are differences of course with Draft, for one AWS doesn’t have Kubernetes available as a system², but mostly CodeStar is about hooking you into the AWS infrastructure similar to how Draft does that with Kubernetes. As it’s part of a commercial offering and not in alpha it’s more polished with many templates and integration with the various Code services³.

Mostly though, both of these are tools designed to abstract away the underlying infrastructure. In the past we used to manage the physical hardware, until we started running VMs on there. Then we moved those VMs to the Cloud and left the hardware to others. With the adoption of tools like Docker and serverless computing we don’t even have to deal with the VMs anymore. And the next step is logically not to deal with these tools anymore either, instead focusing on the solution we want build and trusting that the underlying details are taken care of.

Of course, at this point many of you might complain that this doesn’t work for what you need. And you’d be right. While these tools are very interesting, they are still very limited and not suitable for more than basic applications. For now. At one point the same was said about VMs and containers⁴, but there will be a time when it makes sense to leave the underlying layer to the experts. And that layer is constantly moving upwards in the stack.

Pinboard acquires Delicious

In a move I didn’t see coming, bookmarking site Pinboard acquired bookmarking site Delicious. I’ve been a user of Pinboard for my bookmarking needs for several years now, but as many others I started with Delicious before they got bought by Yahoo! and then sold and sold and sold again. Pinboard is a one person show, and it sounds like it’s been bought to ensure it stays online instead of disappearing completely.

Following that, Delicious is going into read-only mode soon but will remain available like that for an unspecified time.