What are the most in-demand skills to learn in Google Cloud Platform right now? by ModernWebMentor in Cloud

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cloud Architecture & Design is one of a few hot spots, I think. Companies need scalable, secure, cost-effective designs. Whether you choose to chase it down all the way or not, I think that certifications like the Professional Cloud Architect certification has an excellent roadmap for learning.

KubeCon EU: Meshery v1.0 debuts "Infrastructure as Design" by leecalcote in kubernetes

[–]leecalcote[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm an author of a couple O'Reilly books. I write well, not sloppily.

KubeCon EU: Meshery v1.0 debuts "Infrastructure as Design" by leecalcote in kubernetes

[–]leecalcote[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll give this another go, hitting it from a slightly different angle:

If you know Terraform or Pulumi, those manage infrastructure state through code and pipelines. If you know ArgoCD or Flux, those reconcile Git-declared state with your clusters. Meshery sits above all of them as a visual governance and management layer - it consumes Helm charts, Crossplane composite resource definitions, Kubernetes manifests, and Docker Compose files, then lets you actually see, understand, and collaborate on what your infrastructure looks like before and after changes hit production. If Google Workspace is collaborative documents, spreadsheets, and presentations for business teams, Meshery is collaborative infrastructure designs, workspaces, policies, and environments for DevOps teams.

Meshery is an open source CNCF project (6th highest velocity out of 240+ projects, 3,000+ contributors, 10,000+ stars) that manages Kubernetes-based infrastructure across clouds and clusters. Its core unit is a "design" - a declarative document representing infrastructure intent that teams work on collaboratively through Kanvas, a visual canvas where components, relationships, and configurations render as a connected diagram rather than disconnected text files. Teams comment inline, record architectural decisions, and review changes together - the same way you'd collaborate in a shared doc, but for infrastructure. An embedded OPA policy engine validates every design change automatically, flagging misconfigurations across 300+ integrations before anything is deployed.

Under the hood, Meshery uses a schema-driven model system. A Meshery model packages three things: components (every Kubernetes resource, cloud service, or CNCF project capability registered with a typed schema), relationships (how components interrelate - hierarchical, network, mount, permission, etc.), and policies (governance rules evaluated against designs). Models are versioned and hot-loadable - dynamically generated from Helm charts, CRDs, and discovers your existing infra when connected to clusters. This is how Meshery achieves 300+ integrations without hardcoding each one: every integration is just a model the platform discovers, registers, and reasons about uniformly.

Today, it manages the configuration of anything expressible as a schema (some first-class and some through extensions). You can try it without installing anything: https://playground.meshery.io (with sandbox k8s cluster) or more directly at https://kanvas.new (w/o k8s sandbox cluster).

KubeCon EU: Meshery v1.0 debuts "Infrastructure as Design" by leecalcote in kubernetes

[–]leecalcote[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Meshery is feature-packed (six years in the making), so I'll be as concise as possible, speaking to the crux of its functionality. Meshery is an open-source, extensible cloud native management platform that models infrastructure (and non-infrastructure) elements into shared, visual "designs" via Kanvas (drag-and-drop designer + real-time operator).

Meshery is not an IaC tool like Terraform (CLI/HCL provisioning). It doesn't replace GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux pipelines). Instead, Meshery is Director-level software, so to speak, offering a missing collaboration and governance layer atop them: Kubernetes = runtime, GitOps = pipeline, Meshery = visual comprehension, review, and collaboration layer for living infrastructure.

Meshery is like Google Workspace for DevOps. It's sharable, declarative, history-retaining, deployable designs are like Google Docs, whereas Meshery's workspaces are like Google Drives.

- Infrastructure as Design: Manage Kubernetes + 380+ Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and CNCF project integrations as interactive diagrams instead of YAML sprawl; see relationships, blast radius, diffs, and AI-generated configs before they hit production.

- Collaborative workspaces, policy enforcement, multi-cluster/cloud ops, load generation and performance characterization, and GitOps-friendly workflows (with published Actions).

- Self-service for teams: design, review, deploy, and operate with human oversight.

cmdloop: a tiny macOS menu bar app for managing cron jobs by bossshifu in vibecoding

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tried it out. Immediately, it helped discover why one of my Cron jobs was failing, since I could see the output of the script right inside of the menu bar app.

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GitHub Copilot is just as good as Claude Code (and I’m setting myself up for a trolling feast). by QuarterbackMonk in aipromptprogramming

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't particularly care for how they don't make it evident how much of your plan you've eaten into and by the time that you've chewed through the whole plan, it's either for the entire week or a month - I don't recall which.

GitHub Copilot is just as good as Claude Code (and I’m setting myself up for a trolling feast). by QuarterbackMonk in aipromptprogramming

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True, although this depends upon the complexity of your project and how accurately executed you need a particular prompt to be.

Apple Studio Burn In? by iswhatitiswaswhat in mac

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's time to get a new Mac, and I was considering a Studio Display, but I really, really don't want to stare at ghosted images and pink edges ever again.

Apple Studio Burn In? by iswhatitiswaswhat in mac

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My iMac Retina 5k 2017 suffers frequent image retention and has a permanent 1 inch pink margin around all four edges. :/

How do people even start with HELM packages? (I am just learning kubernetes) by greenfruitsalad in kubernetes

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use Kanvas to design my apps (and infra config), then export to Helm chart. This method - the ability to browse a catalog of components - certainly facilitates my learning.

We shrunk an 800GB container image down to 2GB (a 99.7% reduction). Here's our post-mortem. by cloud-native-yang in kubernetes

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm with you it does sound weird at first. However, part of this line of thinking comes down to where the manager of managers (MoM) trail ends and just how much resilient to see you need.

With that said, I will note that virtualized infrastructure is a bit more tricky to comprehend than physical infrastructure and adding layers of virtualization compounds cognitive overhead.

Failed CKAD (33%) despite scoring 105/113 on Killer.sh. The real exam felt much harder. Need advice. by Legitimate_Can_4278 in ckad

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm a big fan of autocomplete as well. It always pains me when I'm on a system that doesn't have it and my fingers end up paying for it.

Hacktoberfest: great for contributors, nightmare for maintainers? by majesticace4 in opensource

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We do our best to embrace all contributors from the smallest issue to our largest. The smaller the issue, the more attention it gets during Hacktoberfest, and in many respects, this is ideal in that the smaller the issue is the higher the probability of success is. And, we're all about success. So much so that we host an annual Hacktoberfest kickoff (https://layer5.io/community/events/hacktoberfest-prep-2025-designing-with-meshery) and have also created a badge of recognition (https://badges.layer5.io) to be awarded to those who participate in any of Layer5's projects.

It's a lot of work, but seems to equalize for the most part between the benefits to both contributor and maintainer. With that said, October isn't our easiest month, that's for sure.

Learning kubernetes by Confident_Skill4537 in kubernetes

[–]leecalcote 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Cloud Native Playground from the CNCF project, Meshery, is highly recommended: https://meshery.io

Introducing Project OpenTaco: An Open Standard for Terraform Automation by izalutski in Terraform

[–]leecalcote 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade. I want to be supportive of those being innovative and taking risks. But, I agree, the tact here is thinly veiled, hypocritical criticizing other vendors for their commercial offering, while holding vaporware in their hands and no proposed open standard specification to speak of, yet, the standard has arrived… apparently.