Meet Mr. Squidler!
Hi, everyone – short post this week! I've been super-heads-down on a) finishing up a client project, b) getting my talks ready for KubeCon1234, and c) trying to drum up some new business. I just wanted to share a couple quick SimKube updates!
A mascot and a logo? In this economy?
As I obliquely hinted at in my last post, SimKube now has an official mascot and a logo! Mr. Squidler, the octopus detective, was designed by the very talented Mariana Mejia5. You can see him in the header image for this post!
Despite his name, Mr. Squidler is actually an octopus. An early conflict with a fiendish distributed systems villain gave him his unfortunate name, which now causes no end of confusion with everyone he meets. His ultimate goal is to track down the dastardly miscreant who bestowed the sobriquet and exact revenge6, but in the meantime he helps people save money on their Kubernetes infra by running experiments and simulations of their environment.
Mariana also designed a new logo for SimKube, which I'm super-stoked about as well:
I'm super happy with how this all turned out, and would definitely recommend working with Mariana in the future if you have the opportunity!
Skctl xray
The other bit that I wanted to share is a quick demo video of some new functionality that's (slowly) making its way into SimKube. As I mentioned last week, one common complaint that people have is the difficulty of getting started with SimKube, and one source of that difficulty is "being able to tell if a trace file will work in a simulation." A common example is if your Kubernetes Pods have a particular ServiceAccount that they belong to, but you forgot to configure sk-tracer to collect or export the ServiceAccounts in your production cluster, then your simulation will fail to run.
An even more basic feature that people have asked for is the ability to see inside a trace file to understand what it's (supposed to be) doing. Well, both of these features can now be solved with a single tool that's built-in to the SimKube CLI (called skctl7). If you run skctl xray on a trace, it will pop up a TUI8 that will show you the contents of the trace, as well as highlight any problems that it detected with the trace file. Check this demo out (note: there’s no sound)!
Not all of the code for this is complete or published yet, but it should be "soon", and hopefully you can see the vision. I'm particularly excited about this work because I'm hoping that eventually skctl xray might be the main entry point or interface for SimKube: I have visions of being able to launch, monitor, and analyze data from your simulations all right from your command line! But we're still a long ways from that being a reality.
Anyways, that's all I have for today. Let me know if you try out skctl xray, or if you like this slightly shorter-form content! I may try putting out a bit more "short" content on weeks where I don't have as much to share9.
Thanks for reading,
~drmorr
I can't believe this is in two weeks! Eeep!
Did you know I'm giving not one, but two talks at KubeCon and/or KubeCon adjacent events? Oh, yea, I already mentioned that in my last post.
This is a short post, so in order to meet my footnote quota I'm having to batch them up a little bit.
Mariana also designed the Kuack the Duck, the Knative mascot, so Mr. Squidler feels like he's in good company.
But, like, nice revenge; he's not a violent octopus.
Pronounced "scuttle".
"Text User Interface", as opposed to GUI, or "Graphical User Interface".
I didn't quite make it to double-digit footnotes on this post, but I still feel like I got a pretty respectable number in.