From "process containers" to control groups

The Linux feature of control groups (or cgroups) originated in what was originally called "process containers". cgroups are a Linux kernel feature.

Read the Kubernetes (K8s) Source Code

The Kubernetes source code is available on GitHub.

In addition to reading the source code, it is useful to consider the intellectual origins of K8s in "Borg".

It is often portrayed as the "spiritual" open source successor of Google's Borg, a cluster manager running hundreds of thousands of jobs, across thousands of applications, running on clusters each of tens of thousands of machines.

The Borg paper covers how shortcomings in Borg were addressed in the design of Kubernetes (this is worth understanding/being aware of). There is an overview here from ACM Queue called "Borg, Omega and Kubernetes" (Omega was an offspring of Borg).

(Historical note: Borg in turn was the successor of two internal Google systems, Babysitter and Global Work Queue, both of whose design predated the introduction of Linux control groups).

The Borg paper also mentions the Google Container Enginer (GKE), which is a Google-hosted version of Kubernetes.

What Linux version runs in your WSL shell?

lsb_release -a

LSB modules are components defined by the Linux Standard Base. They specify standard libraries, commands and runtime behaviours - ensuring compatibility across Linux distros. The LSB project is led by the Linux Foundation.

Does Devin Do The Trick

Devin (from Cognition) is billed as the world's first autonomous software agent. But does Devin do the trick? Can it solve some of the thorny problems in agentic programming?

Logos using or trialling Devin include (in banking) Citi, Goldman Sachs, Santander, itau (in tech) openrouter and servicenow, (in media and telco) Fox, AT&T and (in startups) Modal.

Control-Shift-Escape

This is your shortcut to Task Manager. Use it periodically to build intuition about system resource usage.

Protocol Downgrades

Protocol downgrades, also known as downgrade attacks, bidding down attacks and rollback attacks, is when a computer system is coaxed into abandoning a high quality mode of operation in favour of a lower quality mode of operation.

A historical example was a flaw in OpenSSL that enabled an attacker to use a lower version of TLS between client and server.

What is HSTS?

HSTS is HTTP Strict Transport Security. This is a web security policy defined under RFC6797 forcing browsers to use HTTPS only. This protects users from attacks like protocol-downgrade and cookie hijacking.