Once you’ve got software engineers applying for your job opening, you’ll need to determine who is good enough to interview, and who is not. Additionally, you’ll want to make sure the time investment made by you and your team has a high return on investment. In this part of our series on hiring software engineers as the CTO of a startup, we’ll talk about Blue Matador’s approach to the screening process and the insights I’ve gained in this part of this CTO experience.

Kubernetes 1.16 is almost here and it’s packed with cool new features, like ephemeral containers for easy pod debugging, support for dual-stack network in pods, many new options for the scheduler… And we are just getting started! Here is the list of what’s new in Kubernetes 1.16.

Kubernetes is great but complex! Whether to enable hybrid and multi-cloud, promote deeper specialization among development teams, enhance reliability, or simply stay ahead of the curve, organizations are reaping the varied benefits of this technology investment— but it comes at a cost. With each optimization, there are tradeoffs. With each layer of abstraction comes less visibility, resulting in more complexity when something goes wrong.

K3s and Traefik are partnering to speed up cloud native applications deployment. K3s, by Rancher, is the best way to have a lightweight, fully CNCF conformant Kubernetes cluster running on diverse infrastructures, including possible IoT appliances such as Raspberry Pis. K3s starts in seconds thanks to its light weight nature. As it adds some components to the cluster automatically, k3s is very easy to use and therefore very accessible for new users.

You can never be too safe when it comes to securing your applications. It’s essential that security is a part of the application framework and not just a protective outer layer. Enterprises are swiftly adopting the microservices architecture because of its numerous benefits. However, security still remains a concern. Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto container orchestration tool. And, on its own, Kubernetes seems to be decent for managing secrets.

Mattermost is a state-of-the-art, highly scalable open source messaging platform for secure team collaboration. Kubernetes is a robust open source container management platform that runs on any land-based or cloud infrastructure and automates the installation, configuration, and maintenance of diverse, highly distributed systems. It sounds like Mattermost and Kubernetes are made for each other. And it’s getting even better.

Following security best practices for AWS EKS clusters is just as critical as for any Kubernetes cluster. In a talk I gave at the Bay Area AWS Community Day, I shared lessons learned and best practices for engineers running workloads on EKS clusters. This overview recaps my talk and includes links to instructions and further reading.

Containers, along with orchestrators such as Kubernetes, have ushered in a new era of application development methodology, enabling microservices architectures as well as continuous development and delivery. Docker is by far the most dominant container runtime engine, with a 91% penetration according to our latest State of the Container and Kubernetes Security Report.

When learning a new technology like Istio, it’s always a good idea to take a look at sample apps. Istio repo has a few sample apps but they fall short in various ways. BookInfo is covered in the docs and it is a good first step. However, it is too verbose with too many services for me and the docs seem to focus on managing the BookInfo app, rather than building it from ground up. There’s a smaller helloworld sample but it’s more about autoscaling than anything else.