sebastiandaschner news

Hello from Munich and welcome to another newsletter issue.

I had a great Atlantic Archipelago JUG tour! I enjoyed spending some time again in Britain and Ireland. I could meet a lot of enthusiastic developers and could enjoy, to my surprise, the sunniest weather Britain ever offered me. If you’re curious, you can have a look at the resources for my talks Cloud Native, Service-Meshed Java Enterprise With Istio, and 7 Principles of Productive Software Developers. And you can see some impressions of Manchester, London, and Dublin. Thanks to all of the organizers and attendees for having me! :-)

These days and weeks in August and September are comparably quiet. The next IT conferences typically start again September and October, and also client work for me is quieter in the summer than the rest of the year.

I use this time to look into new topic, learn about new technology, and also, prepare new talks. Right now, topics I’m looking into are Istio, SRE and observability, development productivity, future Jakarta EE technologies, and papers on distributed systems. I’m a big fan of trying to improve and deliberately learn every single day, even if the day just allows a short amount of time. Do you agree? What are things you’re currently learning or would like to learn? Feel free to hit reply, I’m curious about your answers.

What’s new

Istio’s Networking API Explained

The Istio documentation provides a huge amount of helpful information, yet I had to struggle quite a bit to wrap my head around the concepts, and how the individual building blocks are applied.

Therefore, I crafted a blog post including a video with diagrams to explain how the networking (v3alpha) API looks from an Istio user’s perspective, and how typical scenarios are implemented.

I’ve also added a short overview when to use which Istio resource types and what my personal insights and “gotcha” moments have been so far.

It hopefully helps you in understanding and using Istio.

Testing HTTP with httpbin.org

Thanks to the Istio documentation, I just learned about httpbin.org, a HTTP test and ping service that you can use during development. You can control HTTP status codes, optional delays, and much more.

Some examples:

You can either use the online version with HTTP or HTTPS, or deploy your own via the kennethreitz/httpbin DockerHub image.

Another test helper that you don’t have to write yourself :-)

Thanks a lot for reading and see you next time!