Checking In

I am this cartoon character, phoning it in. Generated by Bing Image Creator.

Howdy, all! This will be a bit of a shorter post, I don't have a big topic for discussion today. Also last week I took a day off to go skiing so no blog post then either. Sorry, I'm a slacker.

I haven't done a ton of posting about the day-to-day operation of the business, which is something I wanted to highlight in this blog from time, so in this post I'm just going to go through some of the things that have been occupying my time in the last couple weeks. My hope in posting this type of thing is to give other people who might be considering a similar path an idea of what it's actually like. If it's boring or feels too much like standup feel free to skip it.

Funding updates, aka keeping the biz afloat

Well, first the bad news: I applied for a couple of grants at the beginning of the year, and I found out that—unfortunately—neither of those were funded, which was definitely discouraging. Grants are really hard to get (they have something like a 10% acceptance rate), so on one hand this isn't an overly surprising outcome. On the flip side I'd somewhat convinced myself that I had a pretty good chance of getting at least one of them, so having both rejected felt like a big blow.

But, on the good news front, I managed to close a deal with one of the clients that I've been talking with, and so I started doing some work for them this week, which felt exciting! I'm doing work that will result in a paycheck! It's a relatively small amount, but it's a start. I expect to share a few more details about this in the coming weeks or months. And continuing in that vein, I think I'm close to closing a deal with another potential client, which feels exciting, although nothing's been signed or set in stone there yet, so I'm still kinda anxiously holding my breath.

I'd been waiting to hear a bit more information about my funding for this year before initiating other funding discussions, but after the two grant rejections I've started ramping up my "funding-seeking" activities again. I've applied to the GitHub Accelerator and should hear back about that in the next week or so, and I'm starting to have more conversations with folks again about potential collaborations. I also know (at a high level) what my next grant proposal(s) are going to cover, but I need to find a suitable RFP to apply to.

Project updates, aka keeping the float a-biz

(No I don't understand the heading either, sorry, it's a Friday and I don't care)

Anyways, on the SimKube front, I'm getting really close to being able to run my first "real" simulation. I'm planning to do some comparisons between Cluster Autoscaler and Karpenter to try to get some real data around the two autoscalers. I'm pretty excited about this development, it feels like I'm getting really close to having a useful tool. In the course of that, I've spent a whole bunch of time poking buttons on the AWS console to set up an appropriate test environment. I've spent, like, $5 on EC2 instances at this point, so I'm definitely feeling the cloud computing budget squeeze. If anyone knows any experts in cloud cost optimization, definitely send them my way! 😉

I've also had a couple folks reach out and try to use SimKube, which is exciting. I've found a few bugs that way, and also identified that the process of setting everything up has a strong case of "works on my machine". I'm excited that people are trying to use the project, and also a bit disappointed that I haven't gotten a little further along so that the project is a little easier for other people to use. But hopefully I will continue to improve the experience in the next few months!

Upcoming plans and final thoughts

I did officially register for NSDI, which is happening next month; this will be the first "academic" conference I've attended in a long time, and there are a lot of talks that seem directly relevant to my interests, so I'm pretty excited to attend. I'll definitely have a blog series talking about that conference in the late spring or early summer.

Also on the conference front, KubeCon EU was happening this past week. I've been seeing all the folks posting about the conference on social media and feeling sad that I wasn't in attendance, but I'll definitely be looking through the schedule and watching some of the recordings once they're posted, and I'll do a recap here of any talks that felt worthwhile.

And I think that's pretty much it! Like I said, a shorter post this week¹. Next week is spring break so I'm not totally sure if I'll have a post ready to go or not, but I'm hoping to have some cool new research data to talk about soon!

As always, thanks for reading.

~drmorr

1. Wow, I didn't even manage to sneak in any footnotes to this post, that's disappointing. I promise to do better next time.