Avatar (Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

Red Hat Certified System Administrator

October 1, 2020

A few years ago, I did pass this exam, but since then, the certification expired, so I had to re-take the exam. While the first time I did the exam in a testing center, this time I had to do it at home since all test centers are closed. The experience of doing the exam at home has been a very positive one since you can arrange the environment as it better fits you. You can have as much light as you like (within sensible limits), you can use the chair you prefer and the desk orientation you prefer. You will not be allowed to bring cheating sheets or similar things since the proctor will ask you to show the whole room using the webcam, as you might imagine.

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Fedora Nest 2020

August 10, 2020

This year Flock did not happen due to COVID-19, and in its place, Fedora Nest happened. After many events I’ve seen going virtual in the last few months, I was skeptical. I was yet to see an acceptable online platform to run events. I was wrong on the platform. Fedora Nest used Hopin, which is by far the best platform for events I’ve seen so far. Don’t get your expectations too high, though, because when I say the best one I’ve seen so far, only means that it is usable, and it does not mean in any way that is on par of real conferences.

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Why I switched to systemd-resolved

April 15, 2020

Yesterday, a controversial proposal got posted in the Fedora Devel mailing list: enable systemd-resolved by default. I see this change favorably since I already enabled it a few weeks ago, and I find it a very sensible option.

First, I have to admit that I see systemd and its mission of standardizing the core of the Linux user-space very favorably. At the current level of evolution of Linux, over time, this standardization and consistency will pay off much more than other alternatives. Therefore, I see the introduction of systemd-resolved positively and as an excellent way to abstract many DNS-related problems the rest of the applications.

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FOSDEM 2020

February 2, 2020 - Bruxelles, BE

This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM. As always, I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the main event.

I think it’s fascinating to see how room sizes and crowdedness of the rooms changes over time. Years ago, the container-related rooms (containers, container security, Go) were relatively small, but already crowded, and over the years, the rooms got bigger and bigger. Every year they have been very crowded to the point that for the majority of sessions, some people were turned away. This year this pattern continued for those rooms, except for the Go one, which had a massive improvement in size, and, as far as I know, it never turned away people due to the over-crowdedness. I think this speaks clearly on the importance that containers are getting in those years and the fact that they are quickly moving. If there were no innovations in the container space for the whole year between two FOSDEMs, I think many people would prefer to go to other rooms. I think this is what is happening to the Go room. Even though I really appreciate the Go room and the Go language, I think it will shrink over the next years because - as it’s sane for a programming language - Go is not getting tons of new features every year. Due to this lack of news, people that already know the language might opt for different rooms since, at FOSDEM, there are always many exciting talks at the same time.

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DevConf 2020

January 27, 2020 - Brno, CZ

As it happened at other times in my life, I managed to be present at DevConf. DevConf is one of the best conferences that I attend. The reasons are many and varied, starting from the location that I find relatively stress-free. Another reason is the fact that there are many different kinds of sessions, and many sessions are not overcrowded, so it is relatively simple to participate in any session you would like to.

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FOSDEM 2019

February 4, 2019 - Bruxelles, BE

This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM. As always I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the main event. This year, differently from previous editions, I tried to stick to a single room both days, being mostly in the Go room on Saturday and in the Containers room on Sunday. I made this decision since I’ve seen the advantages of last year experience, where being in the same room for a whole day allowed me to follow more talks and to stress less.

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Why everything will end up in a container

May 9, 2018

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about why containerization is not always the answer and I’ve received quite a few comments about it. This article has the goal to analyze an aspect in favor of containerization which I believe to be true but was not mentioned in the previous post: the time aspect of the phenomenon.

In the ICT sector, we are used to new technologies, or at least we should be. Speaking of architectures, I still remember when I started in the ICT sector that VMWare had just introduced ESX (not ESXi) and there were two ways of looking at it:

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Why containerization is not always the answer

March 27, 2018

UPDATE: I’ve then written another post to clarify better my point of view on the future of containers.

When I hear people (and usually those people are salespeople) saying that as soon as you put a Container Platform in your company, all your problems go away, I feel bad for the company they are trying to sell it to.

I’ve seen far too many container platforms (as well as many other technologies) fail at customers because they have been sold as this magical problem that makes all your problems go away. There are many reasons why a container platform could fail in a specific environment. The main reasons in my opinion are:

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FOSDEM 2018

February 4, 2018 - Bruxelles, BE

This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM. As always I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the principal event. This year, differently from previous editions, I tried to stick to a single room during Saturday (the Go one). Being in the same room for the whole Saturday allowed me to follow more talks (no time wasted moving from a room to another and less sitting problems :D) which was convenient since I wanted to follow all talks in that room anyway.

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Why DevOps is just a buzzword

January 5, 2018

I found myself multiple times in situations where people were trying to explain to me how much they are (or would like to be) DevOps and how awesome DevOps is and how productive their teams had become since when they merged the Dev team and the Ops team, and they don’t have any team which is not DevOps and application-centric. I usually stare at them thinking that they have no idea what they are talking about, or they have just outsourced all the non-application-centric side of their IT and have not realized it.

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