Kanchana's Personal Blog

On my way back I had two paperbacks that was purchased while I was in Austin attending the KubeCon 2017. Kubernetes Up & Running by Kelsey Hightower, Brendon Burns and Joe Beda - this is a special book as I managed to get their Autograph (got two copies one was sent to Colombo office with few other books). Started reading the book after I got on to the plane from LA and managed to finished reading with about 2hrs to land in Australia (in between I watched two movies too ;-) ) Yes I still need to try out many of the examples and possibly building a Pi Cluster in the summer. What did I like about the book? It was an easy read, I was surprised as to how Kelsey, Brendon and Joe managed to keep this book highly technical yet very easy to read and understand. The book covers the most of the key areas related to Kubernetes with detailed examples where possible. They didn't start the book jumping straight into Kubernetes, they had two chapters where they covered on...

I left Australia on 2nd December for the KubeCon and Cloud Native conference in Austin Texas. I knew it was going to be a long journey and knowing that I don't normally get a good sleep on long flights decided to take a paperback and many eBooks. So what did I ended up reading? Cloud Native Infrastructure (eBook) by Kris Nova and Justin Garrison I had already finished two chapters of this book while waiting to get on the plane to LA. After getting on to the plane read another chapter and given my phone battery was quite low I put in for charging while switched to reading the paperback. Anyway I continued reading when the battery was fully charged, so between Melbourne, LA and Austin managed to complete reading the entire book. What do I think about the book? Kris and Justin did a very good job explaining the running applications vs true Cloud Native applications. The book is structured in a way that it's easier to understand even for people who may have not worked or had...

Here are some of my Tech, Startup and other reads plus the Podcasts that Listened to over the past six months. Provided some brief comments. How ever anyone interested to kn ow mo re about my experience on these books or podcasts feel free to drop a note . Tech and Startup related Books Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston Jessica does a  great job i n  interviewing some of the great founders of our ti me. Interesting read and sometime you may wonder how fast things are moving in T ech nology space.   The Art of Fund Raising by by Alejandro Cremades Alejandro does a good job in putting his experience, lessons etc into a great book.  Site Reliability Engineering Edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy Essays from Google Site Reliability Engineers - this book is now available for free. Highly recommended regardless of you are managing web scale organisation or not. The San Francisco Fallacy by Jonathan Sie...

Over the long weekend in Melbourne, Australia I had the opportunity to read The San Francisco Fallacy by Jonathan Siegel.  It was a great book to read, I am glad that I had the opportunity and time to read it. The key reason I liked the book is that while the author Johnathan gave the titled San Francisco Fallacy, the fallacies applied in almost any startup in any city no matter where you are.  He touches on the ten (10) most commonly found fallacies in Startup culture and clearly articulate why they are a fallacy with some of his own experience. I have applied some of his finding in my own experience and he is spot on, highly accurate like he had spoken to me about it. This will be one of the books that I will read at least twice a year to remind myself about the fallacies we all fall in without thinking too much. Highly recommend anyone involved in Startup, especially if you are a founder or co-founder to read this book. I am sure you will find it highly va...

Recently started listening to GCP Podcasts by  Mark  and  Francesc . Doing a great job keeping us informed with GCP services plus great interviews with some of the Google and non Google engineers, developers etc. Great Podcasts and happy to recommend.

It is nearly two years since I started writing about Docker, CoreOS (product CoreOS is now known as Container Linux) and Kubernetes. Wow, what I can say things have gone crazy mad. Both Docker and CoreOS having securing funding last year have made major inroads in to communities and enterprises around the world.  That said Kubernetes is one that is not a company has had the most attention in the last twelve months.  For obvious reasons Google was the first to put their public cloud support for Kubernetes, followed by Microsoft Azure and now I am hearing AWS is planning to do similar level of support (although nothing official from AWS yet). Hopefully something might come out of them as well. While both Docker and CoreOS are growing their business and keep contributing to the community some of the key achievements in the last 12 months were the announcements of donating runC, containerD, rkt etc to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ( https:...

What is Crowfunding? I am not going to bore you with detailed definition around Crowdfunding given it is no longer a buzzword. However given some of the readers may be new to crowdfunding, let me to try to explain in a simple way. "Crowdfunding : is where you are asking general public to trust and fund a project or a venture you are working on. In return you may reward them with your product/s, service/s, equity or add them to hall of fame in honour of their contribution"  What forms of Crowdfunding is available in Australia? While Australian government is working on bringing equity based crowdfunding to the general public, in Australia we have access to donation-based and reward-based crowdfunding. These platforms ranges from US based Kickstarter, Indiegogo, New Zealand based Equitise, Pledgeme, Snowballeffect to local Pozible, OzCrowd, V enturecrowd, M ycause etc.   Donation-based crowdfunding offers general public to donate funds to a good cause...

About  few weeks back I started listening to AWS Tech Chat by Dr. Pete Stanski and Russell Nash on SoundCloud. They are solutions architects of AWS from Australia. Since started listening to their podcats I can now ignore the emails from AWS about their product launch notifications. They cover a most of these latest product updates and deep technical insights into AWS products and services. It is less marketing more technical (otherwise I wouldn't have listened to it). So far they are doing a great job, and if you haven't listened to it before I strongly suggest you give it a go and I am sure you will like it. You might also be able to crack some of the wording Dr. Pete use for URL (urrl) and AMI (amy). It is fun and interesting. I guess my question to Dr. Pete and Russ is when are you gents going to cover AWS Kubernetes offering? given Google and Microsoft are talking a lot about it these days (surprising to without annoying me).  

Google Cloud makes Container Builder in General Availability. With Google Cloud Container Builder: You willl get 120 free build mins each day (extra minutes at US$0.0034 at the time of writing) Build with any language and packed in to Docker containers Automate with CI/CD via API Deploy your container to App Engine, Container OR Compute Engines Pull base images from DockerHub, other public repos or your own Google Cloud Registry Build from Google Source repo or GitHub, BitBucket via RepoSync Tag and automate trigger to make a build via Google Source repo, GitHub or BitBucket This gives you the opportunity to stop worrying about having to maintain build servers, manage and monitor them. 

Since Google released Kubernetes back in June 2014 (ref: Wikipedia ) there was no sign of slowdown. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon to provide some level of Kubernetes offering, from obvious player GCP (Google Cloud Platform), to notable Cloud providers such as Azure (Microsoft), AWS (Amazon Web Services by Amazon). Is this a good thing? Yes of course this is a good thing for individual developers to teams of developers in startups and enterprises this is a good thing.  Other than the three big Cloud players, there are many others  (e.g: EngineYard with Deis , Heptio  with $8.5m in funding, Apcera,  Apprenda  just to name a few)  contributing in many ways to improve and make Kubernetes simple and easy to use and that is a great thing. Linux Foundation has created a training course for Kubernetes fundamentals and there are many meetups around the Globe with more and more resources becoming available to us. In Melbourne Australia we have ...

Sometime you wonder as a Startup founder whether you should spend time on reading someone else's story or rather use that time to stay focus on your startup. Whether you are spending 10hrs or 18hrs a day I strongly believe finding time to read some of these books at very early stage OR if possible before you commit yourself to a Startup will be a great investment. Sometime when you read these books you may wonder how come they are reading your mind, however don't stop keep reading. My selection of books from old classics to new modern methodologies to inspiring stories from founders. I hope you enjoy the list and perhaps find time to recommend some other books as well. The list is not in specific order.      1. Lean Startup by Eric Rise 2. Startup Life by Amy Batchelor and Brad Feld 3. Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz 4. Zero to One by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel 5. Four Steps to Epiphany by Steve Blank 6. Paperboy's Fable...

One Hundred must read tech books, from historical favorites to tech founder biographies, tech novels and some of the new technologies. Let me know if I have missed any of your favorites.  1. The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks 2. The Art of Computer Programming by Professor Donald Knuth 3. Refactoring by Martin Fowler 4. Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein 5. Steve Jobs  by Walter Isaacson 5. Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance 6. Paul Allen Idea Man by Paul Allen 7. The Phoenix Project Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr 8. The Art of Monitoring by James Turnbull 9. The DevOps Handbook by  Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis 10. Strategy Rules by by David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano 11. The Innovators by Walter Isaacson 12. Rework by Jason Fried  13. The Art of Scalability 14. The Everything Store by Brad Stone 15. Co...

Over the past few years we have seen the EXIT of many Public Cloud Providers from pioneers such as Rackspace to most recently CISCO Intracloud . Looking back I was surprised when I heard Rackspace was quitting the Public Cloud marketplace as I thought they were one of the players who could continue to innovate and give Amazon AWS run for their money. However I was wrong, despite their fantastic support and simple pricing they were unable to keep up with innovation behind AWS.  However I was not surprised to hear the exits of GoGrid, HP, Verizon, and most recently CISCO Intercloud despite their large investments and acquisitions. Why? Unfortunately they were purely focusing on trying to copy AWS, Azure or Google. If you take a look at the most recent Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant even IBM Softlayer has fallen off from visionaries to a niche players.  You may ask where is Oracle in this chart? interesting question, however I am not sure if they were even included...